Today we mostly talked about WiX v4 and then did some unscheduled triage of which issues we want to tackle for the first preview of WiX v4.0.

Issue triage

  • Burn Log element bug with Prefix, from @benp87, reports that attempting to use variables in the Log/@Prefix attribute doesn't resolve the variables in the log file names but does when reported in the WixBundleLog variable. We took the issue into WiX v4.x to resolve.

WiX v4 status

The goal for the first preview of WiX v4.0 is to let dedicated users of WiX try out WiX v4 to help us find gaps in important scenarios. For the first preview--named Preview 0--only command-line building will be supported. That helps us focus the work to the core toolset to build MSI packages, WiX libraries, merge modules, and bundles.

The wix.exe command line tool will support the build command to build those packages and the convert command to let you convert WiX v3 authoring to WiX v4. (That used to be the job of the wixcop.exe tool but has been integrated into wix.exe in v4.)

We decided to include the Util, Bal, and UI extensions in preview 0 and at the same time (approximately), to do a build of WiX v3.14 with deprecations matching WiX v4.

Rob wanted to triage all the open issues assigned to the v4.0 milestone. There are 180 of them, which might be a bit much to do in a single meeting so Sean suggested we start today, which we did. So far, we've tagged the following issues to be fixed in Preview 0: