Rob Mensching's Blog - page 14

This is straight up tl;dr but the closing statements from members of punk band Pussy Riot are a fascinating. I don't know that I could write such poignant text ever, much less under similar circumstances. It was mostly intellectual for me until one defendant's psych eval identified her values as: justice, mutual respect, humaneness, equality, and freedom.

When I first moved to Seattle, I lived downtown and commuted to work via bus. That worked out well until the fall when the snowcapped mountains in the east started whispering, 'Snowboarding.' I shopped around until I discovered the then brand new 2000 Nissan Xterra. It was perfect for hauling me and up to 4 friends into the mountains no matter the conditions. I don't do that much any more but I still drive the same vehicle. It's getting up there in years and I anticipate I will have to replace it in the next few years. I dreaded that thought until I read an article on Geekwire comparing electric cars. Now I'm excited, sorta'.

The WiX Toolset was Microsoft's first Open Source project released back in April, 2004. Being first meant we were guinea pigs for a number of new legal and business processes. By 2009 Microsoft had learned a lot about these processes and created the Outercurve Foundation to encapsulate them. Today the WiX toolset finally moves from Microsoft to join Outercurve. Why now? What changes? Let's see if I can answer those questions.

Let me lead with the punch line. The WiX toolset v3.6 production release is scheduled for Labor Day 2012. That means unless the unexpected happens, we're four weeks out from the final build of WiX toolset v3.6. So let's talk about what we do expect for the next few weeks.

I'm on paternity leave currently. I hadn't visited Microsoft campus for three weeks now (one week left on leave) until tonight. Tonight, I snuck in under the veil of darkness to drop off 13 lbs. of M&Ms. One pound for each year I've been at Microsoft. I realized now would be a good time to reflect over the last couple years since last year everything I was working on was top secret.

I'm borrowing a bit of Cookie Monster's personal anthem to acknowledge a mistake I think I made several years ago. If you've worked with the WiX Toolset for any amount of time, you've undoubtedly caught on to the naming scheme we use for tools.

Today we released WiX v3.6 RC. You may remember that less than two months ago we released "Release Candidate Zero". Well, we are back with fewer bugs than ever before (5) asking for you to download this release and tell us how WiX v3.6 is doing. At this point, the feature are all complete and we expect they just work. So what's left?

A name, or if you prefer identity, is a profoundly important concept in pretty much everything. In software deployment identities serve as the foundation for versioning and dependencies which are pretty much everything for us. In ancient Egyptian mythology, Isis was granted power over the all powerful sun god, Ra, when he told her his true name.