Today was, as predicted twice, the first WiX Online Meeting held via our replacement for Skype for Business: We're now streaming on Twitch. Recorded meetings will continue to be posted the WiX Toolset YouTube channel.
Votive v1 released!
After much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and assorted technical difficulties, Rob was able to publish Votive for Visual Studio versions 2010 through 2019 to the Visual Studio Marketplace, ending that particular saga.
Issue triage
heat.exe and fips is an old issue we're triaging because someone has expressed interest in implementing the feature. After much intense debate amid heightened emotions, we decided we'd take the feature in WiX v3 if it were opt-in, to avoid any backward-compatibility issues.
Can't resolve CNDL1150 warning with the information given in the warning, from @MarkStega, is another old issue we're triaging because of a comment asking for clarification on the warning. We added the warning because the MSI SDK documentation says "this functionality is not working as expected" and implies it won't be fixed. However, it's not clear from that somewhat alarming documentation whether only the recovery actions functionality is broken or whether it applies to all service configuration functionality, which includes the ability to set a service as delayed auto-start. In the end, we decided that the best course of action is to add the ability to set a service to delayed auto-start using the WixUtilExtension variant of
ServiceConfigso we took the issue into WiX v4.x to investigate that.Bundle doesn't detect earlier bundle with BundleUpgradeCode in different GUID style, from @nirbar, came back with the information that the different GUID style reported was set as a bind-time variable. Bind-time variables bypass the validation and normalization that happens in the compiler, something that I discovered and talked about almost exactly 11 years ago. Rob suggested we should normalize things like GUIDs in the backends (such as the MSI and Burn backends) in WiX v4 and volunteered to do so, so the issue is in his capable hands.
VS2019 Installer fails in an offline environment, from @mkvonarx, is one of several reports we've received from users trying to install the Votive VSIX package into Visual Studio 2019 when they aren't regularly connected to the Internet to get, among other updates, new certificates and certificate revocation lists. That means the signature used to sign the Votive VSIX packages can't be verified and VSIXInstaller refuses to install them. Unfortunately, we have no control over how VSIXInstaller works and have to rely on Visual Studio to provide any possible support or workarounds.
Project properties in Visual Studio Extension does not handle VS dark theme well, from @Tdue21, reports that Votive property pages don't respect Visual Studio themes like the ever-popular dark theme. They don't and they should, so we took the issue into WiX v4.x for a brave soul to investigate Votive UI.
[Keyboard Navigation - WIX - Setup Successful]"Close" button is not accessible via keyboard on "Setup successful" window., [Screen Reader - WIX - Setup Successful] Narrator is not providing any information about the setup successfully completed., [Screen Reader - WIX - License Term] Name is not define for product logo., [Keyboard Navigation - WIX - License Term] Links inside "software License Term" section are not accessible via keyboard., [Keyboard Navigation - WIX - Setup Option] When user select OK button which available on the "Browse For Folder" popup window, then keyboard focus is not visible on the "Install location" editable field, [Screen Reader - WIX - License Term] Name is not correctly define for "software license term" document section., [Screen Rreader - WIX - Setup Failed] Narrator focus in scan mode does not lands on "0x80070642 - User cancelled installation text". , [Keyboard Navigation - WIX - Setup Option] Narrator focus order in scan mode is not logical, focus move to Title after Cancel button., all from @sikoppar, report a variety of accessibility problems encountered with WiX v3.7 (from 2012, if you can believe that). We're not sure whether all these issues would still reproduce using the latest WiX v3.14 build and we're hampered by not being experts in accessibility to start with. These issues will likely need some study in the area to know what's possible to fix. We took the issues into WiX v4.x for future study.