Rob Mensching's Blog - page 17

Today is my birthday. I use these blog posts like open time capsules. They capture a moment in time at a specific time. Up to this point, birthday's always felt like they were building up to some greater event. This year I feel like my birthday finds me in the middle of execution. That is glorious and frustrating.

In the last few weeks, SourceForge apparently was attacked and they feared the passwords of all users were divulged. To protect everyone, SourceForge required all accounts to re-activate via a link sent through email or answering a secret question. This caught us off guard because we forgot the email address of the SF account used to manage the WiX SourceForge web site and releases page and there was no secret question. The result, WiX v3.6 builds are not being released.

It is my pleasure to announce that WiX toolset v3.5 is now officially declared Production/Stable. The final build number is 3.5.2519.0.

WiX v3.5 escrow has been a bit bumpier than I would have liked. We started with the Thanksgiving Day build. Then we had the end of December build that seemed for sure to be the last one. In the end, we did one more build today. The changes were small so we're only going to sit on this build for a week or so. We're really down to the wire. You know what to do, right?

There is a property in Add/Remove Programs (called "Programs and Features" in Vista+ but setup developers in the know call it "ARP") that can specify the install location for your application. Like most properties in ARP, it's questionable what value InstallLocation provides. However, it's there and some things look for it and the Windows Installer provides a standard way to set it, so let's talk about how to do so with the WiX Toolset.

Today, Thanksgiving Day, we are declaring the WiX v3.5 in escrow. If you follow my twitter account, you saw this tweet yesterday. The WiX v3.5.2325.0 release is the first v3.5 build with zero open bugs. That pretty much defines done! So, what is next for v3.5?

I posted this email to wix-users a while ago but the question keeps coming up: "Is it safe to use WiX v3.5?" The next question is always: "What about v3.6?" Interestingly, my answers about picking v3.5 and v3.6 (the WiX builds under development) are very different than my answers were for for WiX v3.0 and WiX v2.0 (when they were under development).

This morning we released WiX v3.5.2229.0 as the Release Candidate for WiX v3.5!