Renaming Wix installer .msi to .exe

Question

_{Tuesday, December 6, 2016 12:25 PM}

Hi,

I have Wix installer setup for my project, which is generated in form of .msi, i wanted the installer to be changed to .exe, is there any way i can change the installer from .msi to .exe, i found there are some tools online but all of them were windows app, i needed something like command line, so that i can run it every time build is created, it changes from .msi to .exe

Its very urgent, if someone knows of any command line tool for this, it will be a very helpful for me at this time.

Thanks in Advance,

Hemal Kotak

All replies (3)

_{Wednesday, December 7, 2016 3:20 AM | 1 vote}

Hi Hemal Kotak,

Welcome to the MSDN forum.

Refer to your description, your issue is more related to the WIX. Since our forum is to discuss Visual Studio WPF/SL Designer, Visual Studio Guidance Automation Toolkit, Developer Documentation and Help System, and Visual Studio Editor, I recommend you redirect to this appropriate forum: WIX Support Forum for the detail information, you will get a more professional support from there.

Meanwhile, as far as I know, we can output type before we build the WIX projects, right click the project name and select ‘Properties’, under ‘Installer’ tab we can click the dropdown list of ‘Output type’ and choose ‘Executable Package (.exe)’ like the following screenshot:

Best regards,

Sara

MSDN Community Support
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_{Tuesday, December 20, 2016 1:28 PM}

Hi Sara,

Thanks for the information on how to create .exe installer, but when its created it gives below error, i did try to change the project output type to x86 / x64 both  configuration when .exe installer is built, it gives same error.

can you please let me know what i am missing?, i actually wanted x64 bit installer.

Thank you,

Hemal

_{Wednesday, December 21, 2016 5:59 AM}

Hi Hemal,

Thank you for your update.

Refer to the error messge, I found a similar issue from the WIX support forum, please have a look at this: http://windows-installer-xml-wix-toolset.687559.n2.nabble.com/setup-exe-not-valid-td7587718.html

Phill Hogland:
If you mean that you have a WiX setup project and you changed the output name from something.msi to something.exe, then that won't work and I would expect the errors that you described.  The file is an .msi file and is not in the EXE PE format, regardless of whether it was renamed to something.exe.

If this is what you did, then revert your change back to something.msi and create a new 'bootstrapper' bundle project which imports the something.msi in a EXEPackage element.  Then when you build the bootstrapper project it will output an EXE which contains your MSI package (depending on the options you implement).

If you are using Visual Studio (with WiX Votive installed) then look in New Projects for the WiX bootstrapper project template.

It looks like I made some mistake, sorry for this inconvenience, it's better to redirect the WIX Support Forum and get a more professional for your issue, thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Sara 

MSDN Community Support
Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" the responses that resolved your issue, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if not. This can be beneficial to other community members reading this thread. If you have any compliments or complaints to MSDN Support, feel free to contact [email protected].