Today's meeting was triage. Just triage. We had our normal incoming triage and we also started, as promised, to review the current slate of issues scheduled to be addressed in WiX v4. Refining that list will help us figure out when WiX v4 is ready for mass consumption and on the road to be released!
Issue triage
Allow MSI ProductVersion to be any valid WixVersion, from @rseanhall, suggests that because Windows Installer is documented to ignore the fourth version field, WiX should allow anything there, including SemVer-like non-numeric tags. Sean clearly approves, I don't agree that it should allowed by default, and Rob thinks it's cool but doesn't want the overhead of an opt-in approach. So we settled it with a highly technical decision-making matrix (rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock): We moved it to the v.Next milestone for more thinking.
Unable to create New WIX project in Visual , from @MrKBM, began as a bug report about a failure creating a new project with Votive. It ended with the reporter figuring out the problem: A "bare" Visual Studio installation didn't support creating a new .wixproj project. Installing a Visual Studio workload resolved the problem. We kept the issue open for a possible investigation into whether the Votive VSIX or template projects could specify any required Visual Studio components.
WIP: Organized obsolescence of Heat in v4, from @robmen, brings to the foreground the background problems of Heat. There are two things to think about: (1) How do we deal with Heat in WiX v4? and (2) How do we deal with Heat after WiX v4? For WiX v4, we need to solve the problem of distribution: Is Heat.exe made available via NuGet package or a WiX tools bundle (similar to how WiX v3 is distributed)? Maybe we can go back to a .zip file, like how WiX v2 was distributed. After WiX v4, we have time to look at ways of taking advantage of the new build pipeline built into WiX v4 to replace the way Heat.exe is architected today. (For example, Heat is built using CodeDom, which in modern .NET is replaced by Roslyn. Also, Heat needs to be built with .NET Framework, to support assembly harvesting.) That is for the future, however. Rob is writing a WIP to describe the options he's investigated and propose solutions. It should make for great summer reading.
WiX v4 issue triage
We also reviewed the issues currently assigned to WiX v4. Our goal was to go through quickly, mostly to get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on whether the person an issue is assigned to still plans to resolve that issue by WiX v4 Preview 1. We mostly accomplished that goal, though we did dig a bit deeper on a few. We decided to defer a few, mostly because we felt they were low priority or because we want to tackle them holistically as part of a bigger effort in WiX v5. Still lots to do for Preview 1.