WIX installer why you no MSBUILD no more?

Last night I chopped up my WIX installer project – I basically split the actual installer parts into one file – CoreMsi.wxs, the versions into a variable file – Version.wxi and the file list into a separate fragment file – SimsBulkImport.wxs. This worked.

Great I thought, simple PowerShell script to generate the file list, I can even grab the main repository complied bin as a artifact dependency – got to love TeamCity.

Problem was, it fails to build.

error CNDL0104: Not a valid source file; detail: ‘.’, hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 2, position 1.

bit of trial and error later I figured it out. It was my old friend Mr Encoding. After adding

-Encoding “UTF8” 

to the end of the Out-File and it builds again.