Today I did some localization of my WiX based installer and learned, that Windows Installer must have a very old code base. While localization with WiX is really easy it inherits some limitations that you don’t expect nowadays. First you cannot use UTF8 or Unicode to define your string tables. No, you need to specify windows codepages that should be used for a concrete language. Unicode is not supported. So you have to dig in old documentation for appropriate codepages (Luckily I can use Windows-1252 for West European Languages). Second you cannot simply build one msi for all languages. You must build a msi package for every language. Then you can either use a bootstrapper to decide which msi to start, or you can use some black magic on the command line which uses transformations at runtime to morph one msi into the appropriate language. Multi Language packages are not built into Windows Installer.
I had another strange behavior today regarding the usage of WiX library. I made a simple library with some very minimalistic installer gui which needs three images. 
The three images are located inside an Images folder. See attached picture for the project structure. The files are referenced like this:
<Binary Id="Banner" SourceFile="Images\banner.bmp" />
First build succeeded than it always failed, saying that it could not find “Images\banner.bmp”. It seems some tool in the chain needs an absolute path because I fixed the build by adding the $(sys.CURRENTDIR) preprocessor directives:
SourceFile="$(sys.CURRENTDIR)Images\banner.bmp"
And you need to check “Bind files into the library file” on the Build page of the project properties. Else the library contains only the filenames and every project using the library must have access to the absolute path of the images. By default this is unchecked which imho corrupts the meaning of a redistributable library.
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