Rob Mensching's Blog - page 16

Happy Thanksgiving Day! I hope you have much to be thankful for.

A week ago today, my wife and I brought our first child into the world. Bradley Reece Mensching was born at 2:44 PM on November 5th, 2011. Bradley was 15 days late but arrived a healthy 7 lbs. 3 oz. nonetheless. Mom and baby are doing great as we adjust to our new life as a family of three.

If I was a Microsoft executive I would start off by saying I'm super-excited to announce the release of the WiX v3.6 Beta. But I'm not. I'm just your friendly local WiX Toolset benevolent dictator saying that WiX v3.6 is looking pretty good and we'd like to try it out. While Wix36.exe downloads, let's talk a little bit about what's in WiX v3.6 Beta and what is not.

What do you get when you take a high speed camera, a canister full of liquid nitrogen and a bunch of geeks? You get Smashfest 2011 and a lot of awesome pictures.

I didn't plan to start my discussion about the new installation technology in Windows 8, AppX, with this topic. However, a quick scan through this morning's email from wix-users prompted me to start here.

I joined the Developer Division almost 2 years ago. When I announced the move I spoke about my new focus on the short and long term of setup on Windows. In the Windows 8 keynote and the Developer Preview bits available now you can see the results of both. It all starts in the keynote when Antoine Leblond comes on stage and fires up Visual Studio.

It's been nine months since the last "State of the WiX toolset" blog post and six months since the WiX v3.5 release. Unlike last year we find ourselves focused on a single front, WiX v3.6. Let's take a moment and evaluate where we are and where we are going.

The Visual Studio setup is composed of over 30,000 source files that get compiled into over 250 MSI files. Needless to say it is a large code base. The problem is that a lot of the code was machine generated and is now very difficult to maintain. A few months ago, I started a large scale restructuring effort to improve the code and build process. I thought I'd share one of the key aspects in my restructuring effort.