Easiest way to write a PlugIn installer?
What's the easiest way to write a PlugIn installer, particularly for a single Dll plugin? It looks like I just need to xcopy the one dll to the plugins folder (%ProgramFiles%\Windows Live Writer\Plugins).
Is there some "WLW PlugIn Msi factory" somewhere that takes in the one dll name and produces the MSI that does the copy? (and does not require being an MSI/Wix master to use).
I see a blog here:http://bplo.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!CF2831C0AE64E81B!210.entry, but that leaves a lot of gaps and looks like you need to be a Wix guru to use.
Thanks!
My understanding is that Visual Studio's built-in support for creating installers is sufficient to do this. I haven't verified this myself but someone else on our team did.
Although it would be awesome if someone took Bonnie's blog entry and hooked it up to a web form that could auto-generate the wix and build the MSI 
It's not clear that this is even possible w/ VS's built-in installer support. VS Setup projects by default wants to copy the program to it's own directory under "Program Files" and and does not provide a clear way to override that behavior to copy to WLW's PlugIn directory instead. Although, I'm sure there's a hook somewhere to allow it; but it certainly does not make this intuitive.
I notice the example in the WLW beta SDK didn't include an example VS setup project.
That goes back to my original question: what's the easiest recommended way to do this?
You can just put the plugin into your own directory, and then use the PluginAssemblies reg key to tell WLW where to find it.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa738841.aspx
Sorry the documentation is not better in this area. The fact that we require .msi distribution at all is a problem IMHO and one I hope we can do away with in the future!
That's a useful link.
Yeah, Setup projects ought to be able to do that PlugInassmeblies reg key thing. I didn't realize that was an option. Although the xcopy to PlugIns would be nicer (less registry goo).
So it sounds like the answer is that there's not an easy way to do this; and that the installer (and not actually writing the plug-in) is the expected pain-point for getting a plug-in on the gallery.
I guess at this point my question degenerates into a set of suggestions:
- Include the a walkthrough of Bonnie's Wix script, thus providing an example of how to actually use it. This would show what text gets replaced, and what Wix tools are executed (command line to Candle.exe/Light.exe, etc). (I'd guess this is the easiest)
(In random trivia: It looks like Bonnie's Wix file does a file search for WindowsLiveWriter.exe instead of using the "InstallDir" registry key to find it. )
- allow submitting raw PlugIn dlls to WLW Gallery, and they just download to the WLW PlugIn directory.
Bit late joining the show on this thread, but all my plugins use the PluginAssemblies registry key and they work perfectly. As for how to get the installer to copy to the Plugins folder, just change the properties of the Application folder to point to the %Program files%\windows live writer\plugins\ folder. The only problem will come is if the path changes for the Live Writer to something other than what I just wrote, which is why I use the PluginAssemblies.
