Our 288th WiX Online Meeting took place on the First Day of Furnace Weather here in Michigan. Normally I force myself to wait until November to turn on the furnace for the season but, like my cold-blooded lizard forebears, I don't do my best thinking at 59°F. So bundle up, watch the meeting playback, and celebrate the season—Happy Halloween and/or Spocktober to all who celebrate!

Issue triage

  • Exception when parsing overridable variables case-insensitive, from @nirbar, reports a crash when specifying that command-line variables should be case-insensitive. This being an election year, Rob took the controversial position that crashes are bad for the country and volunteered to fix it.

  • Make better API for WixOutput, from @barnson, came from my investigation into a customer report. WiX v4 and later use a .zip file for storing "outputs," which includes .wixlib and .wixpdb files. When building a .wixlib with its files embedded into it, WiX consumes a lot of memory, about 150 percent of the size of the files embedded into the .wixlib. That can get problematic with big .wixlibs. I worked around the issue and shipped that fix in WiX v5.0.2 but that whole experience suggested to me we need to sit down and review the WixOutput API overall, so we're not exposing too much of the underlying .NET .zip API (or at least the API's idiosyncrasies).

  • Add support for MSOLEDBSQL, from @charleshepner, requests that, in addition to the two data-access APIs that WixToolset.Sql.wixext already supports, it should also support a third, newer data-access API that Microsoft introduced---to keep SQL Server developers from getting bored, I guess? Keeping current is a fine idea, so we opened this issue up for grabs.

  • Page Not Found: /schemas/v4/wxs/bal, from @YetAnotherAxel, might at first seem like a complaint that the schema .xsd files aren't available directly from the schema namespace URIs. However, this issue points out that our current documentation build system is "helpfully" turning anything that looks like a URL into a hyperlinked URL. So we're essentially adding our own broken links, which seems like a bad idea at first glance. Rob, who's looking at updating the documentation site, volunteered to make sure this issue doesn't happen in the new world.

  • Update "How To: Block Installation Based on OS Version" documentation with Windows version fix and Wix 4-5 compatibility and Document how to fail installation on missing or too old VCREDIST, from @forderud, request modern versions of a couple of how-to articles that were created for WiX v3. That's a fine idea and as the reporter also provided a pull request, Rob and/or I will review that when our copious spare time allows.