And I though LA Traffic was bad...

I was following up on a recent article on an open source project that builds Windows Installer packages (.msi and .msn files) called WiX and wandered off to its lead developer Rob Mensching's blog where he had this post about driving in India: Its like Frogger!

That post links to this video at YouTube.  All I can say is that I'm surprised the 2 minute clip doesn't include at least one fatal injury ;-)

Aside from that digression, WiX looks like an interesting way to build reliable installation kits for both large and small tools without being obligated to buy yet another developer tool or distort the build process. Being command line based, it should integrate nicely with traditional Makefile builds, and comes with task definitions to fit with the new class of build tools (in particular Ant and MSBuild) that describe projects in XML.

I am currently using Inno Setup as my installation creation tool of choice, but it doesn't always play well with others since it creates executable installers rather than MSI packages. It too is open source, free, and it does integrate with Makefiles, so I don't have that much incentive to change tools.