Setup Matters

For the third year in a row, we're shipping a new WiX release candidate for your packaging business and pleasure. Download it, use it—it's an easy job to upgrade—and report any bugs you discover.

Sometimes lessons don't come from perfect demos. Sometimes the lessons come from mistakes. Big mistakes. Catastrophic mistakes. This episode happens to be one of those.

Since our last meeting, winter has settled in here in the northern hemisphere. Personally, I'm not a fan. It's cold, which brings the need for gloves and hats. It's snowy and icy, which means boots and comically slipping in public. On the plus side, it encourages developers to stay indoors where it's warm and you have big monitors and nice mechanical keyboards. Maybe that's why we schedule WiX releases for the spring? Well, it's coming up this year quickly: WiX v7.0.0-rc.1 ships in two weeks.

This was a great episode to finish out the year. We use everything we've learned this season to build something real. As always we encounter some surprises and use those moments to learn more and solidify our foundational knowledge of MSBuild.

We are well into winter here in the northern hemisphere—even though it's not technically winter for a few more days. In the Pacific Northwest, winter is wet, especially this year. Here in Michigan, it's meant absurd amounts of snow for pre-solstice times. But today, it's sunny and above freezing, so I celebrated by shoveling slush. Happy holidays indeed.

In this episode, we use everything we've learned over the last couple of months to avoid doing work. It takes a lot of mistakes but that's still one of the best ways to really learn the ins and outs of MSBuild.