Rob Mensching's Blog - page 18

Most of you aren't my friend on Facebook. That's okay, you're not missing anything. In fact, my Facebook profile was completely dead until Twitter created the Facebook app that republished my tweets. Until yesterday, I basically added no additional content to Facebook than what I posted to Twitter. What changed yesterday?

After five months of heads down coding on Burn in WiX v3.6, it is past time for me to take a deep breath and look around. A quick glance tells me that we are doing okay but we are late. The core contributors of the WiX Toolset are working hard but we are fragmented so progress is slow. Let's look at where we are at with WiX v3.5 and WiX v3.6 in detail.

A good question about Burn was raised in the comments on my blog entry about Burn yesterday. The tiny executable that downloads the bulk of the installation content is great when you want to install on your computer. However, if you need to distribute the installation to many machines, like most corporations do, downloading from the Internet is more expensive than downloading from a corporate server. Fortunately, we have a solution for this scenario.

This is the blog post I've been wanting to write for a couple years. The WiX Toolset finally installs via Burn in WiX v3.6. The install is ugly and buggy but it's functional. I would not recommend installing WiX v3.6 right now unless you're willing to dig into the source code to figure out what's going on. And there is a lot going on, let's take a look at some of the highlights.

I'm am so frustrated right now.

If you've dealt with the Windows Installer at all, you know the fastest way to figure out what went wrong is to look at a verbose log file. The normal log file doesn't provide enough information to really diagnose things going wrong, so I always generate a verbose log file.

Bob posted a blog entry how to use TortoiseHg to access the WiX source code on CodePlex. I thought the blog post was great but suffered from one fundamental flaw. It required you to do a whole bunch of mouse clicking. Here's how to get into the WiX Toolset source code using the command-line.

There was a small change made to the WiX Toolset recently that added dialogs to the WixUI library that are shown when patching. That part of the change was straight forward, the tricky part was that the dialog needed to support all the existing languages or the patch UI could come up in a different language (English) than the initial install.