Welcome to the Highlights post for the Centennial WiX Online Meeting! Well, not exactly 100 years but 100 meetings since we started (virtually) meeting—thanks to FireGiant for sponsoring the Skype meetings!—to triage bugs, review pull requests, discuss issues, and ask and answer questions.
WiX v3.10.3 update
This week's update on WiX v3.10.3 is that there was a bit more progress from the GDI+ team on a possible workaround. That workaround isn't exactly clear—as far as we know, the registry API functions have always lived in Advapi32.dll—, but the progress is promising. While that's ongoing, Rob has created the branch for WiX v3.10.3 so we're ready to go.
Another candidate bug for WiX v3.10.3 came up this week and we covered that in triage and the pull-request review.
WiX v3.11 update
Listeners got to hear me ramble for too long about WiX v3.11 and v3.x in general. Key takeaways:
WiX v3.11's focus is to support the next version of Visual Studio.
WiX v3.11 will strongly ramp down on adding extra features.
For WiX v3.x, bug fixes are important and so is compatibility (with Visual Studio and Windows) but we've reached a point where we need to be spending more time getting WiX v4.0 ready than enhancing WiX v3.x.
Issue triage
Need option to allow duplicate directory IDs #5227 is a request from @heaths to add a switch to allow duplicate directory ids to be in scope at link time. There's already a deprecated switch (-ai) to allow any duplicate ids so it's not clear that this addition makes sense. After some discussion, Heath and I agreed to discuss the issue offline and report back.
Add Support for ImportBefore and ImportAfter targets in Wix Tool Installation Directory #5228 comes from @BobSilent, who suggests that the WiX MSBuild targets should support a customization technique that's supported by the standard C# and VB MSBuild targets. We decided to take this suggestion only in WiX v4.0.
Cannot terminate processes with 0 exit code #5229 is from @heaths to fix
CloseApplicationto allow aTerminateProcessvalue of 0, so a terminated process appears to end with a success exit code. Heath provided a pull request that we agreed to take into WiX v3.11.Need ability to add users to Performance Log Users #5230 is also from @heaths and requests the addition of a couple of new properties to the OsInfo custom action. Because it's additive and isolated, we took this in WiX v3.11.
Launching installed application with burn isn't launched in the foreground #5232 is a report from @lwarren01 that WixStdBA launching an app doesn't do so in the foreground. There is much voodoo in Windows around foreground, background, and active windows, so we took this issue in WiX v3.x for someone to research what's going on.
WiX 3.10.1 failing to update to 3.10.2 #5234, from @ConfigurationNation, is our "fun" bug of the week because it was introduced in WiX v3.10.2 as part of the clean room change. Luckily, @rseanhall investigated the bug and gave us our pull request to review for WiX v3.10.3.
Evaluate use of element text #5235 comes from, hey, me, and was intended to highlight a particular problem I ran into while working on the ThmUtil library in WiX v4.0: Specifically, the use of element text gets complicated when there's a need to also support child elements. Rob suggested this should be a WIP more than an issue and I agreed.
Pull request review
This week's pull request comes from frequent contributor @rseanhall as a fix for WiX 3.10.1 failing to update to 3.10.2 #5234. The resulting discussion was interesting in direct proportion to your interest in Burn internals and went back and forth a few times as we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches.