Explanatory notes on the organization of this project.

Repository Branches

The most recent, and potentially unstable build, will be in the main branch. Releases are branched/tagged with semantic version numbers (ie. v2.3.4). WIP Features and will usually be housed in temporary branches – these branches are often deleted when no longer needed.

I develop my documentation in Obsidian. In this repo, he obsidian branch is a WIP documentation branch that contains automatic checkins from Obsidian. These are merged (and squashed) back into main periodically.

Building from source

I’ve turned this into a Microsoft Visual Studio Solution to organize the dependencies between the resource project (skvfximageres), the batch files (UE_QuickLaunch) and the installer (UE_QuickLaunch_installer) projects. I use Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022

Visual Studio 2022 - requirements:

The installer is built using WiX v4, and uses the HeatWave extension:

If you load the solution and the installer project comes up as “incompatible” (you’ll get an error on load), just enable the extension, restart, and then right click on the UE_QuickLaunch_installer project, and select “reload project” (or something similar to that).

If you’re interested in learning how to make an MSI installer using something like HeatWave, I found the Wix v4 documentation pretty impenetrable, but ChatGPT did a pretty good job at getting me started with the xml syntax.

The installer, UE_QuickLaunch_installer.msi, runs unassisted and builds into the UE_QuickLaunchInstaller/bin folder and installs to ProgramFiles/SKVFX UE_QuickLaunch. It can be uninstalled/modified, in Window’s Settings > Apps > Installed apps.

WiX v4 resources:

• https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/blob/e29b4aacf89ce060509b20a5f81df200f7d2fbc1/src/ext/UI/wixlib/WixUI_InstallDir.wxs
  • This is the wix extension code for the InstallDialog - I was able to kind of understand what was needed by just digging into this source.
• https://www.nuget.org/packages/WixToolset.UI.wixext/
  • This looks like it may have a list of the extensions I can install. I don’t see any documentation, though
• https://www.firegiant.com/wix/tutorial/user-interface/ui-wizardry/
  • This is WiX v3, but I think I’m starting to get my head around the v3/v4 differences (i.e. “Product,” became, “Package”, etc.)
• https://www.firegiant.com/docs/wix/v3/tutorial/
• I’m finding I can stub together close-to-working v3 code snippets and use wix convert to get a better idea how to format the v4 version. This is helping, but what a PITA. Document your fucking code.

Generate Logfile for Installer

msiexec /i UE_QuickLaunch_installer.msi /L*v ".\InstallLog.txt"