Today we're just five meetings away from WiX Online Meeting 0x100, a milestone we should most definitely celebrate with pie. Or maybe WiX Online Meeting 0xFF is more interesting. Hey, why not pie for both?

WiX v4 release plan

How many ways can I say it? We're continuing to march to our plan of approximately-monthly release candidate releases. Upcoming is Release Candidate 3, on 24-February. The schedule for Release Candidate 4 is 24-March. After that? So far, the counts of incoming bugs for each release candidate have been going down and so has the complexity of those bugs. That's a sign -- or we're taking it as a sign, anyway -- that we're getting close to the point at which we can say that WiX v4 is ready for the masses. If you'd be so kind, please check our math on that and if you find a bug we just have to fix, report it.

Issue triage

  • Check latest CUBs for best compatibility for WiX v4 GA, from @barnson, came back to triage at my request. (Well, I just added the triage label, which is more of a command than a request, technically.) I checked the latest available ICE validators and, with great sadness, concluded that the bug in ICE103 in mergemod.cub hasn't been fixed yet. My question to triage was whether we could just suppress ICE103 when validating merge modules. Reimplementing the ICE103 checks in WiX itself is a long-term goal, to avoid numerous problems running validation. Unfortunately, ICE103 is sparsely documented (at best) so I'm wary of reimplementing it. For now, we'll suppress ICE103 for merge modules and aim to reimplement it and the other ICEs in the future.

  • QuietExec actions hang when the launched process exits while keeping its stdout or stderr alive, from @nirbar, points out a problem when the process launched by one of the "quiet" custom actions itself launches child processes that never exit. That's fairly unusual; we expect child processes but not that they'd stick around forever. Sean and Nir are discussing a change Nir proposed but at this point in the v4.0 cycle -- 4.0-rc.3 coming in a couple of weeks! -- we're looking for an additive change rather one that replaces the existing functionality.

  • Burn should have informational version variable too, from @barnson, came up when I was documenting Burn's built-in variables: We have an InstallerVersion variable to provide the 4.0.0.0-style version but none to provide the SemVer-style version number with commit id. I volunteered to add one for 4.0-rc.3.

  • Building with HarvestProject fails (WinUI + .net6), from @ilamp, reports a problem using the .NET Framework-based MSBuild with Heat's HarvestProject item. Sean discovered that it works when using the "core" version of MSBuild via dotnet build. Getting it to work with .NET Framework-based MSBuild might require some magic we're short on. This issue is open as up for grabs for someone to investigate possible changes.

  • Exception thrown after ParsePossibleKeyPathExtensionElement called when File keypath set, from @robmen, is an "internal" bug that Rob discovered and plans to fix. I originally added the functionality for a compiler extension to set a component's key path type and Rob suspects the bug dates all the way back there. I'll give up my 2009 WiX bonus check in reparation.

  • Wix 4 Rc2: Better error message if directory for HarvestDirectory cannot be found, from @ChristianSauer, points out that if you use HarvestDirectory pointing to a directory that doesn't exist, you don't get a nicely actionable error message. We're big fans of nicely actionable error messages, so this issue is open and up for grabs for a good writer of nicely actionable error messages.