Rob Mensching's Blog - page 18

WiX

Burn, baby. Burn.

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.

Personal

Frustrated.

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.

Since it's launch in 2004, the WiX Toolset has been completely hosted on SourceForge. SourceForge is fine but feels a bit clunky and a little behind the times. About a year ago I started looking at alternatives since open source hosting platforms are now a dime a dozen. In the end, I didn't find a single platform that offered everything I wanted. However, CodePlex provides Mercurial and a much better file release system than SourceForge so I decided to use those for WiX.

This blog post about the Remember Property Pattern now lives as an article here.

WiX

Change of plans for WiX v3.5.

About a year ago we started WiX v3.5. At that time we decided on a new plan for WiX v3.0 that moved the Votive for Visual Studio 2010 and Burn features out of WiX v3.0 into WiX v3.5. The goal was for v3.0 to ship earlier. That worked out well because WiX v3.0 released last July.