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I'm trying to customzie the WixUI_Minimal dialog set on WiX 3.11, using Visual Studio.

Following the manual here does not work anymore as it reports of a lot of duplicate symbols. For example:

Duplicate symbol 'ControlEvent:VerifyReadyDlg/Back/NewDialog/WelcomeDlg/Installed AND PATCH' found. This typically means that an Id is duplicated. Check to make sure all your identifiers of a given type (File, Component, Feature) are unique

(This stack overflow question ran into the same issue)

Trying the solutions in this question did not help either as it was coming up with various error codes (different than those mentioned in the question).

This question and this one didn't help either.

It seems something broke in Wix 3.11 / Visual Studio 2017. Has anyone managed to understand how to fix it? Am kind of fearing WiX is losing it's support from its authors...

Oded Ben Dov
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  • [Just lobbing you a link for now](https://github.com/skullpsg/Wix_installer/tree/master/BlogCustomAction/BlogCustomAction). – Stein Åsmul Mar 10 '19 at 21:30
  • In addition to Chris's answer, maybe [have a skim of this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52654935/changing-text-color-to-wix-dialogs). Different ways to customize MSI / WiX GUI. – Stein Åsmul Mar 11 '19 at 12:42

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I'm not sure why you think WiX is losing support. Plenty of free support is provided here and on the wix-users mailing list. They also offer paid support options with SLAs and fixes. Other consultants such as myself provide free support and paid support also.

The WiXUI is a simple to use canned set of UI with limited override/transformation capabilities. You can do things like insert a dialog into a wizard loop sequence but doing so requires that you understand how the rows in the ControlEvent table area evaluated.

You can get an example here:

https://github.com/iswix-llc/iswix/blob/master/Application/IsWiXNewAddIn/MSISolutionTemplate/SetupProjectTemplate/UI.wxs

My uncommenting line 10 it causes it to consume this fragment:

https://github.com/iswix-llc/iswix/blob/master/Application/IsWiXNewAddIn/MSISolutionTemplate/SetupProjectTemplate/UI-CustomDialog.wxs

Lines 33-34 insert rows into the ControlEvent table that take priority over existing rows based on:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/msi/controlevent-table

If this is too limiting for your needs, you can intead not use the UI extension and simply take a copy of all of it's files from here and do anything you want with them:

https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/tree/develop/src/ext/UIExtension/wixlib

Finally if that doesn't meet your needs you can always create a custom bootstrapper application for Burn and use WPF/MVVM to do anything you could possibly want.

FWIW, I've been writing installers for 23 years and using MSI for 16 years. I'm the author for the FOSS project IsWiX which provides templates and designers to simplify automate most of this work. You can get an idea of how IsWiX works here:

https://github.com/iswix-llc/iswix-tutorials

1 hour free consultations are available for interested parties. Just shoot me an email or send me a LinkedIn invite.

Christopher Painter
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  • Thank you @christopher - meant no harm :) Just browsing through the forums made me feel a lot has been pushed to a future 4.0 version, while that is not coming anytime soon - that I could see. I've taken from install_dir currently and made it work from other questions here, but I'm sure your input will be valuable for others (or future me) – Oded Ben Dov Mar 18 '19 at 09:22