Last week Bob pushed the latest WiX v3 release to SourceForge. The original intention was to declare that drop as the final Beta build for WiX v3. However, I changed my mind for two reasons.
First, I know a lot people don't pick up weekly releases, only SourceForge drops. Sad but true. Since it had been a while since the last SourceForge drop and I wanted to make the drop then watch to see if anything new came up. Nothing has.
Second, we were very close to zero bugs on the core toolset and had a couple extension bugs that could be considered blockers. With an extra two weeks I was pretty certain that we could knock out a few more of those. Bob and I have made good progress through those this week (holidays can be good for the volunteer hours).
That means it is very likely that next week's release will be pushed as the "official WiX v3 Beta release".
You might wonder what it means for a project already called "beta" to have an official Beta release. In this case the Beta release marks the turning point where all of the major features for this release are finished and the bug flow such is under control and on a solid downward trend.
The goal is to provide a build and encourage all WiX v3 users to upgrade. That way we focus our efforts on finding all of the remaining bugs and figure out what bugs get fixed in WiX v3 and what gets moved to WiX v4. If you've found a bug in the WiX toolset get it filed soon.
Bob Arnson is actually the architect of this plan for finishing WiX v3 in 2009 so look for more details on Bob's blog over the next nine months.
posted @ Saturday, November 29, 2008 3:52 PM