Today's meeting fell just five days before Election Day here in the USA. In just five days, we get to celebrate a great event: The end of political ads for another 18 months or so.

Issue triage

  • Burn shouldn't propogate the burn.filehandle.self command line parameter, from @rseanhall, reports a bug that, luckily, has no visible effect. So we should definitely fix it but nobody's too worried about it at the moment so we'll let it hang out in the WiX v4.x milestone until someone has a slow weekend and is looking for a fun C++ bug to fix. (Yes, sometimes, it's fun to fix a C++ bug.)

  • Default bitmaps for UI are still not sized properly (+ recommendation), from @donnaken15, points out that in these days of HiDPI monitors and varying per-monitor DPI settings, the default bitmaps in the WixUI dialog library can stretch in unflattering ways. Unfortunately, Windows Installer UI support doesn't include concepts like scaling and contrast qualifiers. A simple option is to use simpler images with solid blocks that would scale better but would likely be even more unflattering than the current behavior. It might be possible, between a WiX extension and copious custom actions, to mimic some level of support for scaling and contrast -- but at the end of the day, Windows Installer UI is not extensible and a complete solution might not be possible. As Burn bundle UIs have none of these limitations, they're certainly my preferred solution. We took this issue into WiX v4.x for anyone motivated to investigate the possibilities.

  • WixConverter should fix $ prefixes to the ! given that $ was depcreated and is no longer supported., from @barnson, suggests that the wix convert command should convert WiX v2-era $(loc) references to !(loc). I agreed with myself and volunteered to implement this feature request in WiX v4.0.

  • Name property does not assign to edit field., from @harshgangrade111, is another in a painfully-long line of reports concerning accessibility in the WixUI dialog library. We added it to the WixUI accessibility tracking issue.

WiX v4 design discussions

With a few more issues assigned to the Preview Zero milestone, we're very slightly down to 39 bugs to hit Preview Zero. We discussed one of those issues:

The last (known) (so far) WiX v4 design discussion will take place next week and it promises to be a barn burner.