A significant blocker for some of my customers moving to Visual Studio 2013 (and 2012 previously) has been the removal of Visual Studio Setup Projects; my experience has been confirmed by UserVoice. Well Microsoft have addressed this pain point by releasing a Visual Studio Extension to re-add this Visual Studio 2010 functionality to 2013. This can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery.
Given this release, the question now becomes should you use it? Or should you take the harder road in the short term of moving to Wix, but with the far greater flexibility this route offers going forward?
At Black Marble we decided when Visual Studio Setup projects were dropped to move all active projects over to Wix, the learning curve can be a pain, but in reality most Visual Studio Setup project convert to fairly simple Wix projects. The key advantage for us is that you can build a Wix project on a TFS build agent via MSBuild; not something you can do with a Visual Studio Setup Project without jump through hoops after installing Visual Studio on the build box.
That said I know that the upgrade cost of moving to Wix is a major blocker for many people, and this extension will remove that cost. However, please consider the extension a tool to allow a more staged transition of installer technology, not an end in itself. Don’t let you installers become a nest of technical debt