msi limitation - 1600 components per feature

msi has the follwoing limitation: 1600 components per feature:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368579(VS.85).aspx

But why?

http://www.appdeploy.com/messageboards/printable.asp?m=20038

http://blogs.msdn.com/icumove/archive/2009/05/31/right-corner-wix-heat-left-corner-thousands-of-files.aspx

Useful links for WIX UI.

WIX provides you with sets of built-in UI dialogs. To add a dialog set, add the reference the WixUIExtension:

light Product.wixobj -out Product.msi -ext WixUIExtension 

Built-in dialog sets in WIX Tutorial

But what if I need to customize my installation?

The following articles could be usefult to understand how to customize installation dialogs:

Wix Tutorial - Lesson 8

Extending UI

Windows Installer - User Interface Reference

Will try to consolidate all this information into the one article.

Installation process

Excellent article: How Windows Installer installs msi

When we launch Windows Installer engine (by running msiexec.exe) we are launching the client process. Client process will launch the Windows service process.

Log investigation is always helpfull. Read about logs here. The article contains link to a document where log file is explained in more details. Here the link for the document (Annotated_Windows_Installer_Log)

Upd:

one more article about installation phases

how to read Windows Installer Verbose log article

custom actions article