How can I register a COM-Object with Windows Insta

Question

I have got the following Problem: In my WiX Setup I need to register a COM Object. I have got a ".tlb" File and a ".dll" File (in my example: XYCommon.dll and a XYCommon.tlb) Now I want to make the Setup to Register the TLB. How Can I do this in Windows Installer XML ?

My first try was to work with a CustomAction and Open "Regasm.exe" and Register it - but I dont know how I can bring the Regasm.exe to Register the XYCommon.tlb

Any Help ? Thanks

Answer 1

Use the WiX harvester utility called Heat. It will generate the WiX source that contains the necessary registry entries to correctly register (and unregister) your COM objects.

Will your COM objects (XYCommon.dll and XYCommon.tlb) change often?

If no: then just run Heat on those two files (read up on the command-line parameters and experiment with them to get the desired output), clean them up if necessary, and add them to your project.

If yes:

If you want to try to run Heat as a Visual Studio prebuild event, this SO answer should give you some guidance: Add a folder to installer in wix not files?

Sometimes when you use Heat you still need to tweak then generated .wxs files a little. Therefore you may want to write some wrapper utility that calls heat on a list of files or a directory, then cleans up the output how you would like. Then you can add the utility to your build process.

Example of using heat on an individual file:

heat.exe file myFile.dll -gg -g1 -suid -svb6 -out myFile.wxs

Example of using heat on an entire directory:

heat.exe dir myDirectory -gg -g1 -suid -svb6 -out myDirectory.wxs

Breakdown of some of the parameters I used:

• heat.exe: you'll have to specify the full path to the executable if it's not in your path
• file myFile.dll: specify that you want to run heat on the single file, myFile.dll
• dir myDirectory: specify that you want to run heat on the directory, myDirectory
• gg: generate guids for the components
• g1: generate guids without the curly braces
• suid: suppress creating uniquely generated ids for files and components, instead use the file names as the ids
• svb6: suppress harvesting COM information for the VB6 runtime. Note: If you want to register COM objects that use the VB6 runtime, you need to use this flag so that you do not overwrite your VB6 runtime registry entries