Upgrading a Wix 3.x project to Wix 6.x with VS 2022

[KristoferA]

Question

I have a Wix 3.x project that I maintain and build with Visual Studio 2015. I want to upgrade it to the latest and greatest version of Wix, so I have installed the HeatWave visual studio extension (FireGiant.HeatWave.Dev17.vsix).

However, when I try to open the existing Wix 3.x .wixproj file with VS 2022, I get an error saying "The project file cannot be opened by the project system, because it is missing some critical imports or the referenced SDK cannot be found.".

I'm not sure which SDK I am missing or what I need to do to install it..? The 3.x project builds fine in VS2015, and I can build newly created projects with VS2022. Do I need to install some Wix 3.x components for VS2022 to be able to open the Wix 3.x project there before converting it to Wix 6.x?

Open Source Maintenance Fee

• I (or an organization I'm a member of) pay the Open Source Maintenance Fee by sponsoring the wixtoolset project because I support the maintainers.

[robmen]

If you installed HeatWave, you should be able to right-click on the WiX v3 project and select an option to upgrade it to the latest WiX toolset.

[KristoferA]

Thanks. Yes, that worked. I just got confused by the error popup that I got when opening the solution.