unit test installers

I am starting to do some installer work using WiX (yay, not Installshield开发者_JAVA百科) and I was hoping to do some TDD of the installer. Does anybody know of an easy way to do this?

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It sounds to me more like an integration test than TDD.

As far as i can tell there are no MSI testing suits per se.

Nevertheless you could try something like this ( assuming you have a contiunous integration server):

1. after successful build, install MSI on a clean virtual machine - if installation fails do something (mail, ticket, whatever)
2. run whatever integration tests you have on your project

After that you can be sure that installed application does what it should.

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Does it make sence, if you create some script file that checks that files are on the right places. I expect make it as perl or python script

test_installer_wix.pl

msiexec /x product.msi # remove
msiexec /i product.msi /silent # install

ASSERT_EXIST_FILE(PFILE, 'productname/application.exe')
ASSERT_REGKEY_EXISTS()

and etc.

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I want to add link to post about how to create unit test for WIX installer database: http://miroslawmiodonski.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-create-unit-test-for-wix.html

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It might not be a bad idea to run a few standard tests on a generated MSI. MSI files support a lot of different deployment scenarios: admin install to extract files, advertised install for active directory, silent install, maintenance install, uninstall etc... Maybe it is indeed an idea to create a small test suite for this - perhaps it's even being considered for the WIX toolset for all I know.

However, I think the first, best step towards delivering a quality setup would be to run the MSI through the MSI validation suite. These are referred to as ICE (Internal Consistency Evaluators) and they are delivered as *.cub file with the Windows Installer SDK. Running these scripts tend to reveal lots of bad design constructs in the MSI. The WIX tool for this is called smoke.exe.