Today is our 249th Online Meeting, which means our next meeting (in two weeks, as per usual), will be our 250th. If we'd held one Online Meeting a year, it would be our semiquincentennial, which is an awesome word when you break it down to meaning "half of five hundred years." Words are cool. Here are some more that aren't nearly as cool but aren't all bad.

Issue triage

  • Conversion to vs:FindVisualStudio isn't 'pretty', from @chrpai, points out that after wix convert run, some converted code isn't nicely formatted. Personally, I recommend formatting semi-obsessively -- ^K^D in Visual Studio is handy. But I volunteered to take a look at this issue because the bad formatting would be resolved if wix convert removed the newly-unnecessary-in-WiX-v4 PropertyRef element.

  • WiX v4 compression does not create files as small as v3, from @Mertsch, came in over the holidays and as there's nothing more fun than investigating bugs over eggnog and twinkling lights, I verified that WiX v4 is doing the same kind of compression as WiX v3. That leaves several different possibilities, so we've asked for more information to track down the differences.

  • License file scroll bar is at the bottom at load time, from @virzak, demonstrates a difference between bundles built with WixStdBA in WiX v3 and WiX v4. Specifically, a bundle using WixStdBA's RTF license themes look different right at load time: In WiX v3, the license is shown at its beginning in the license control, but bundles built with WiX v4 show the end of the license. Well, that's no good, so I volunteered to investigate the relatively minor code changes to see what changed and, hopefully, figure out how to get the old behavior. Wish me luck.

  • WiXUI attribute to omit EULA dialog, from @chrpai, requests more flexibility using the new-to-WiX-v4 WixUI element in WixToolset.UI.wixext. There is a lot of configuration we could do in that compiler extension and this is an example of such; we'll look at it in a future release.

  • HarvestDirectory fails with cannot find System.Runtime, from @BryanCrotaz, demonstrates a bad warning message from an attempt to harvest assembly information. Other harvesting works as expected but the warning message could be friendlier.

  • ProjectReferences and PackageReferences can encounter issues with TFMs, from @robmen, is a tracking issue for a gnarly problem at the intersection of MSBuild, Visual Studio, and NuGet. Rob's looking to pick the brains of the appropriate teams at Microsoft but should that fail, we're keeping the magical herbs ready to summon other-worldly assistance.

WiX v4 release plan

We continue to march along with the WiX v4 release plan: The -rc.1 build was released as planned on 15-December and we're on track to release -rc.2 as planned in a couple of weeks, on 20-January. We'll almost certainly release -rc.3 sometime in February...but will there be an -rc.4? And if so, when? That will depend on the bugs you find and report, so, you know, go do that, please and thank you.