[This is prerelease documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

This tutorial demonstrates how to write a data model in Microsoft code name “M” and then load the model into the code name “Oslo” repository. Once the model is in the “Oslo” repository database, applications can read and update model instances to drive application behavior or analyze the model by directly querying the model instance data.

This tutorial describes how to create setup applications using modeling. It is common for an organization to create many Windows Installer (.msi) files. It can be difficult to generate reports about those setups applications to understand details such as the number of files installed or the content of those files. This information can be manually recorded at the time of the setup creation, but that can result in inaccuracies; in addition, predicting the exact information to capture for the future is difficult.

This tutorial creates a model of a setup application. A separate custom application, repinst.exe, reads instances of this model in the database. It uses those instances to dynamically create .msi files and install them. The fact that the application uses the setup model to create the setup application ensures that any analysis queries against the setup model return accurate data.

To implement the repinst.exe application, this tutorial uses an open-source tool, the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset. WiX creates .msi files from XML definitions. For more information about using and obtaining the WiX v3 toolset see Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset.

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