How do I transfer progress information from a custom ExePackage back to the writer?

Question

I have my own ExePackage in my package, which runs for a non-trivial amount of time. I would like to report a progress indicator for the recording engine so that the progress bar continues to show progress while ExePackage is running.

The ExePackage element has a “Protocol” attribute, which appears to provide a way to pass an “advanced progress and error report” with parameters: “none”, “burn” and “netfx4”, but I did not find any documentation on how to implement any of these protocols.

Answer 1

This may not add much, but I found this in the WiX 3.8 source code (in \src\tools\wix\Xsd\wix.xsd ).

• none - the executable package does not support the communication protocol.
• burn - the executable package is another Burn package and supports the Burn communication protocol.
• netfx4 - the executable package implements the .NET Framework v4.0 communication protocol.

So it looks like this is an option if ExePackage is another Burn package or .NET Framework 4.0 executable.