title: WiX installer and custom actions
body: <p>I have an application that is a not so simple Windows service (C#). I created an installer using Visual Studio 2008, which did the job of installing the service on the clients machine, but using the Visual Studio deployment project has 2 drawbacks:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>I can't seem to get the installer to build using MSBuild (i've tried the DevEnv.exe method). The service is a small piece of a much larger project, and I'd like the build of the MSI file to happen at the same time as my build does. I have used WiX for the other installers, but this particular application requires a configuration step in the setup.</li>
  <li>There seems to be a bug in VS 2008's deployment project when installing windows services. On repair and upgrade, the service is never stopped. (caused by an invalid sequence for RemoveExistingProducts - i have worked around this by changing the sequence to 1525)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>What is nice about VS2008's deployment project is that I created a custom action that shows a form that gets some info from the user, connects to a WCF service, which retrieves data and stores it in an encrypted data store on their local machine for use by the service. </p>
  
  <p>Now, I have looked high and low, and I don't see this being possible with WiX. Running an EXE after the program has installed isn't 'nice'. I'd like to be able to call a method in my Custom Action DLL that displays the form, and does the processing it needs to. Is there any way of doing this with WiX? -- or even, create a custom GUI in WiX that gets the values and passes these values to a method for processing</p>
  
  <p>So, questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is this possible with WiX?</li>
  <li>What are my alternatives if not?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Many thanks</p>