It would take me hours to rant about everything I hate about VDPROJ. I won't because in my (expert) opinion it's already settled law that VDPROJ sucks. If your install is so simple that you haven't noticed any problems, then be my guess and stick with it. But if you already find yourself fighting the tool trying to get it to do things it doesn't do, then take my advice and dump it fast for WiX.
10 things I hate about VDPROJ
- No MSBuild Support. Sure, you can call devenv from the command
line but it's not as good.
- No exposing of the critical concept of
a component. Every file/reg key is a keyfile of it's own component.
- No effective way to fully exclude automatic dependency scanning.
- Shortcuts are always Advertised
- No way to describe a service.
- No way to describe many things which leads to overuse of custom
actions.
- No way to fine control the scheduling / execution of
custom actions. Too abstracted.
- Abstraction is wrong. Deferred
CA's are scheduled with Impersonation which breaks on Vista.
- Various limitations lead you down a path of massaging the built MSI
during postbuild to get around all the limiations. Results in a
very poor build automation hacks.
- Merge Module directory tables
are authored incorrectly.
- 100 other things suck that I'm not
remembering right now.
与恶龙缠斗过久,自身亦成为恶龙；凝视深渊过久,深渊将回以凝视…
