[WiX-users] 64-bit WiX

[Navid Azimi-G. <na...@mi...>]

I realize that this has been a long standing issue<http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=9EE4B5B02235CB43ACFE2376CC2F11F0D03891%40ntxbeus04.exchange.xchg> but I am working on getting the WiX toolset to compile and run as 64-bit processes. This is necessary because we're running into a BadImageFormatException when trying to invoke WiX via a 64-bit MSBuild process. For the most part, WiX seems to be run well on 64-bit architectures. However, almost all of the executables and WixBuild.Common.targets are hardcoded to x86. After playing around with the code, the (main) culprit it appears to be the native winterop application. I otherwise managed to recompile most of the exectuables (that I needed anyway) to AnyCPU including heat.exe, xsdgen.exe, msggen.exe, candle.exe, etc. Unfortunately, as you likely know, light.exe barfs with the following:

light.exe : error LGHT0001: Unable to load DLL 'winterop.dll': The specified module could not be found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)

I am testing with v3.5.1602.0 of WiX and MSBuild 3.5. Is this on anyone's radar to fix for the WiX v3.5 timeframe? Is there really no easy to get this working? Am I better off looking into getting MSBuild to spinoff all of the WiX processes in WOW64?

>From what I can tell the work items to get this working include:


1.       Fix WixBuild.Common.targets (and NAnt) to allow compiling for 64-bit architectures.

2.       Remove all PlatformTaget=x86 references in the affected .csproj files.

3.       Recompile / find 64-bit versions of following unmanaged libraries / executables:

a.       burnstub.exe

b.      setup.exe

c.       setupbld.exe

d.      mergemod.dll

e.      mspatchc.dll

f.        SetupBuilder.dll

g.       stdux.dll

h.      winterop.dll

I think steps #1 and #2 look relatively easy but I am not sure about the availability / feasibility of #3. I suspect this is what has been delaying this feature request?

Thanks,
Navid