Once again, we skipped a week between meetings. This time, it was me who was traveling. And like the previous meeting, we had a larger-than-average number of bugs to triage: 18.
Due to a Skype problem, Rob was unable to present video during the meeting. That mostly turned this week's meeting into a podcast.
New issue triage
Bug 4770 | Preprocessor condition is always true regardless of the value of A reports that an
<?if?>preprocessor instruction without an operator always evaluates as true. That essentially turns<?if?>into<?ifdef?>. It seems to be an intentional behavior, but we agreed it would be more convenient if<?if?>evaluated the argument as a boolean if there were no operator. However, as it's a hugely breaking change, we opened it for consideration in WiX v4.0.Feature 4771 | NativeImage Id attribute should not be required requests that an
Idattribute not be required. We've made manyIds optional during WiX v3.x and WiX v4.0 generalizes that. For now, we're not anticipating making additional language changes in WiX v3.x, so we resolved this as fixed in WiX v4.0.Sean created Feature 4773 | Modify Burn API and its corresponding WIP to create a more flexible bootstrapper application interface to the Burn engine. Several times during WiX v3.x, we've modified the interface and managed to spackle over the changes but there are limits and those limits restrict what we can do in minor releases of WiX.
Sean opened Bug 4774 | Cache takes too long when there are several thousand payloads and a corresponding pull request. There are some questions about the change so we decided to take the change in v3.11 instead.
Heath opened Bug 4775 | Always set WixBundleOriginalSourceFolder if not already set and a corresponding pull request. We took the bug into WiX v3.10 and I'll merge the pull request in my copious spare time soon.
Feature 4777 | You can override wix variables via command line in WixStdBA, but in Managed BA you can't. requests the equivalent of the
Overridableattribute for managed bootstrapper applications. Managed BAs can already do their own command-line processing but Sean's given thought to providing more equivalents of BalUtil functions for managed BAs, so we took this feature request in WiX v4.x.Bug 4778 | Burn failed to initialize COM at EngineRun(). is a sad tale about an app that injects itself into other processes and doesn't follow the rules of COM. Rob took the bug for WiX v3.10 as it's a fairly easy fix.
Bug 4779 | Patch rollback works, but previous applied patch does not show in 'view installed updates' (after rollback) reports a problem with superseding patch bundles. It was difficult to tell from the logs exactly what the structure of the bundles is, so we requested more information from the reporter to get a better idea of what's going on.
Bug 4780 | wix 4.0.2926.0 fails to install is a bug in the WiX v4.0 installer that came from differences in the authoring between WiX v3.x and v4.0. We took it in v4.0.
Bug 4781 | v3.10.0.1726 bootstrapper can not be launched when dotnet is not installed. is a bug somebody introduced as part of another fix. (Luckily, we don't place blame in the WiX project.) I took the bug for WiX v3.10.
Bug 4782 | Heat creates invalid HELPDIR in harvested fragment for OCX files with incorrect registration data says that Heat produces bad authoring when given bad self-registration in an OCX control. We took the bug for WiX v3.x.
Feature 4784 | Support linking to existing files through "Paste as Link" is a feature request for Votive to support an alternate way of adding links to files in a project. We took it for WiX v4.x.
Bug 4785 | Allocation of "Record" in line InstallPackage.cs:537 in method UpdateFilesOnOneMediaDisk(..) is not freed is a repeat of an earlier bug. We opened this one in WiX v3.x.
Bug 4786 | WixUI "default" license is the CPL is a bug I opened when I noticed that the EULA in the WixUI dialog library is the old WiX license. We decided it made more sense to replace it with a dummy license rather than WiX's current license. I took it to fix in WiX v3.10.
Feature 4787 | ThmUtil should support system colors is the feature request I created as a result of both Feature 4783 | Burn does not support high-contrast themes and Bug 4769 | Issues with accessibility and the "High Contrast Black" theme part of Windows coming in this week. ThmUtil, the library WixStdBA uses for its UI, supports only hard-coded colors for fonts used in the UI. Hard-coded colors don't work when using Windows's high-contrast themes, which coerce the foreground and background to black and white (or vice-versa). Windows exposes the concept of "system colors," which adapt to theme colors. ThmUtil needs to support system colors to be as adaptable.
WiX v3.10 triage and status
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be available on 29-July. Though Microsoft has not also announced a date for Visual Studio 2015, 29-July is a line in the sand; we can assume Visual Studio 2015 will come out shortly after Windows 10. So the clock is ticking. We previously had four bugs open in v3.10 and took four more this week. But all are trivial.
Our current plan is to ship a Release Candidate build around 15-June. After that, we'll take only critical fixes. As soon as Visual Studio 2015 ships, we'll send out the call for folks to help test with the final Visual Studio 2015 bits and release WiX v3.10 as soon as we're comfortable everything continues to work as well as it does in Visual Studio 2015 RC.
Stay tuned!