Rob Mensching Openly Uninstalled

Hi Rob,

This roadmap covers the most of directions I thought about. Especially two things are I would like to see in next WiX version with a big pleasure: easy to use bootstrapper and visual designer for creating custom UI for our installers in visual studio (using Votive).

Thanks for your job!

Hi Rob,

what I would like to see is a more appealing installer UI out of the box. From my point of view it looks a little bit clumsy. Maybe it could look a bit more like Installshield/Wise since these are well known and wide spreaded.
Unfortunately I'm not a UI/graphics freak (as you) so I'm not able to help here a lot even if I want to.

Hi Rob,
I echo some of Dmitry and Dominiks comments. I would like to see an improvement in the initial components, I would like to have at least the UI components you get from a Setup Project when you initially create your WiX project in VS.
i've decided not to use WiX over setup projects because of the initial impact of developing an installer. Setup projects take me about 1/2 day to get up and running.
Keep up the good work, I hope to use WiX in the near future.
LP.

Hi Rob,
could you let us know which weekly build will be the last, most stable one before all the new things start getting added? I am using v3 in a commercial product, so it would be very helpful to know which build I should keep using while most of the development is going on.
Thanks,
Patrick

Patrick, such a build does not exist in WiX v3 today. For example, there are a great number of bug fixes in WiX v2 that have not been ported up to WiX v3, yet. Those should be showing up in the next couple weeks. There has also been ongoing work on the patching stuff for quite some time now (that thankfully hasn't yet proven to be very destabilizing).

There really isn't a "known stable build" of WiX v3 right now. That's why v3 is marked "unstable" on Source Forge. <smile/>

If you're on WiX v3, you should expect to pick up new versions of the toolset at least monthly for the next 6 - 9 months.

Excellent news Rob.

Your roadmap seems to cover everything i need from Wix.

However i didnt quite understand what an application type is (bullet 5b)

If you get chance could you expand more fully on point 2b - Extensions.. A few lines with more detail would be lovely :)

I particularly hope to see thorough extensions to handle performance counters, event viewer support (including support for the event view system available), AD manipulation etc.

I know most of this can all be done via registry manipulation, but wrappers would really help alot of people

Thanks again

Steve,

Good to hear. I was pretty confident in this roadmap after just listening closely to the world at large.

2b, I don't have an ordered list of extensions but the ones you list are definitely on the list. I'm actually hoping the community will help pick up slack so the more important thing is getting the system stable and explaining how to write extensions.

5b, ClickThrough application types are the domain specific applications that ClickThrough targets via ClickThrough Extensions. Today there is the Isolated App (per-user) and the Office Addin. I'd like to see a few more to round out that covey of application types.

I imagine Patrick is using v3 despite it's `unstable` designation because there is some feature he must have or it's a no go. That was the choice I faced when evaluating v2 vs v3.

Rob, Perhaps you and I can talk one day about bootstrapper setup chaining stories. The last place I worked took this story to a completely different planet. Way beyond the level of integration that I'd ever seen any other bootstrapper accomplish. I shared this information with another vendor recently as they also realized that this is the direction their customers are beginning to need heavily.

Rob,
I just became aware of the "WiX Bootstrapper" planned feature you mention above by way of a reference from one of your later blogs and just wanted to throw my 2 cents about the subject in general.

In the previous platform SDKs Microsoft provided the "canned" setup.exe with some limited support for stuffing properties into the built binary. However, this was entirely too limited for general use other than in the most basic way. Then VS started having some basic setup functionality via ClickOnce deployment support and along came the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator project (http://www.codeplex.com/bmg) to give us some more control - but again, that was too limited for general bootstrapper use. Then there are the 3rd party tools that have there own canned bootstrappers with limited functionality (such as InstallShield). Basically, the point is that all these efforts could have been avoided if there were an open source bootstrapper solution that supported a wide range of deployment scenarios (not just WiX/MSI).

I would like to ask if you've given any consideration to making the bootstrapper support a separate open source project in and of itself? The way I could see this working would be if Microsoft were to publish the source for the VS bootstrapper (or the Office 2007 bootstrapper source) that already recognizes the basic ClickOnce XML schema and then allows the open source community to extend the XML schema into a more robust tool that could be used with any deployment strategy without the setup developer needing to "roll his/her own" each time a bootstrapper is needed - regardless of whether the setup uses WiX, MSI via another packaging tool, non-MSI installs, or any combination thereof.

Any thoughts?

It occurred to me I didn't finish my thought regarding how a separate open source bootstrapper project would solve the WiX bootstrapper problems. To give greater control to the WiX community, the open source bootstrapper project could be designed in such a way that extensibility is added via plug-ins and the WiX project could have it's own official plug-in that enables chaning WiX MSI projects.