Today, we had only five issues to triage but there was no shortage of discussion.

Issue triage

  • Bug 4836 | "'darice.cub' cannot be found" error pops up randomly had no changes from last week. We resolved the bug with a request for logs should the reporter reproduce the problem.

  • Feature 4865 | Heat: Invalid payload for MSU packages shows a problem with Heat generating RemotePayload authoring for .msu packages. RemotePayload was mostly implemented for .exe packages like the .NET Framework redistributables. RemotePayload specifically supports the attributes needed to replace the data that the binder would normally acquire by scanning an .exe file, like version, certificate information, and hash. MSU packages need even less data but RemotePayload doesn't let you omit them. So this is a multipronged issue: the compiler needs to support the right set of attributes for MSU packages and Heat needs to generate them.

  • Bug 4866 | In rare cases, Burn incorrectly detects a MSI package as installed while the MSI package itself does not reports, as the title suggests, that Burn doesn't always do MSI package detection correctly. However, from the details in the issue, it seems the problem occurs after profiles are reset. As Burn uses the MSI API to detect packages, if MSI's private data were incorrect, the answers from the MSI API are likely to be incorrect too. Even if we could use another technique to detect packages, without knowing more about how and why the data's wrong, it would be difficult to ensure such a technique would work.

  • Bug 4868 | FileSearch does not work inside a merge module reports a failure in the AppSearch action from a merge module. The problem appears to be the use of a standard folder property like ProgramFiles64Folder. Ids from merge modules are modularized to prevent duplication when multiple merge modules are merged into a single MSI package. When the black box that is mergemod.dll merges merge modules (he said alliteratively), it adds custom actions that set the modularized property to the standard folder property value. But that only happens for directories that are explicitly authored into the merge module. A workaround is to add the directories the merge module references: <Directory Id="ProgramFiles64Folder" Name="." />

  • Feature 4867 | Support ISO/IEC 19770-2:2105 (aka SWID Tags-2) came from those fine folks at FireGiant: to support the new SWID Tags spec. There's a WIP and pull request. This is a medium-sized change that we normally would avoid at this stage of the WiX v3.10 cycle. However, though the timing is less than perfect, SWID tags are a pretty big deal in government and large organizations, so we decided to take this change for WiX v3.10.

WiX v3.10

So, given the small number of trivial changes, tiny number of minimal changes, and one medium change that we've taken in WiX v3.10 since what we'll now call RC1, we'll very shortly have RC2. If all goes well—that famous phrase—we'll ship WiX v3.10 in short order, as soon as Labor Day.