WinUI and WiX installer

Question

Can we use WiX toolset to create a installer for a WinUI app? I've found documentation for creating an installer for Windows Forms project but is it possible for a WinUI app?

Answer 1

Definitely. WinUI applications are just files, shortcuts and the such like any other application.

Answer 2

Using this project template:

I added/changed these properties

<EnableMsixTooling>false</EnableMsixTooling>
<WindowsAppSDKSelfContained>true</WindowsAppSDKSelfContained>

I was able to build and run the exe. However when I tried to create a publish profile:

The app fails to start and in Event Viewer I see:

Faulting application name: App1.exe, version: 1.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x65180e9d
Faulting module name: Microsoft.ui.xaml.dll, version: 3.1.3.0, time stamp: 0xbfd77fd2
Exception code: 0xc000027b
Fault offset: 0x00000000007e5d6a
Faulting process id: 0x0x4E5C
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1D9FCC088F82193
Faulting application path: C:\1\Test\App1\App1\bin\win10-arm64\publish\App1.exe
Faulting module path: C:\1\Test\App1\App1\bin\win10-arm64\publish\Microsoft.ui.xaml.dll
Report Id: 7b83068d-8606-4d4c-9139-f787771a1739
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID: 

This is strange because .net sdk projects are supposed to be published not built. Anyways if the files from the build can be xcopied to another machine and ran then WiX can surely do the job.