Rob Mensching's Blog - page 19

Personal

Unplugging for two weeks.

Today, Jenny and I start the first leg of our flight to New Zealand. On March 1st we will arrive there without February 28th existing. The international date line is so cool.

Today I turned 0x21. For the non-geeks out there, that's thirty three. The way 21 feels like a coming of age for many people (hey, I can drink now!), 33 feels like a huge step for me.

Over the last week and a half, the Visual Studio team that contributes heavily to the WiX toolset put the finishing touches on Votive to support Visual Studio 2010 RC. Want to use WiX in VS2010 RC? Download the x86 or x64 Wix35 MSI from here: http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.5.1419.0/.

Okay, last week I posted a video of Jonathan Coulton and Kid Beyond. I had never heard of Kid Beyond before but his beatbox skills impressed me so much that I immediately ordered the album.

Honestly, the TARGETDIR/SourceDir Directory element is something that we should have hidden from the developer using the WiX Toolset but didn't. Sorry. The truth of the matter is that the Windows Installer expects the Directory tree to always be rooted in a Directory row where the primary key (Directory/@Id) is "TARGETDIR" and the DefaultDir column (Directory/@Name) is "SourceDir".

WiX

Glimpses of life with WiX v4.0.

Believe it or not, I sometimes get questions about WiX v4.0. "Rob, is there going to be a WiX v4?" "Rob, what's going to be in WiX v4?" "Rob, when does WiX v4 start?" "Rob, when will WiX v4 be done?" Before answering, I always make sure that people understand that WiX v3.5 is our focus right now because it is important that we support for Visual Studio 2010 and get Burn "v1" done. Then I mention what I mentioned here yesterday, WiX v3.5 slipped from March to probably September.

WiX

Burn moves to a new foundation.

A week ago a very big accomplishment happened very quietly. The development team inside Microsoft responsible for creating the .NET Framework 4.0's (NETFX4) bootstrapper finished the initial transformation into the WiX Toolset's bootstrapper, Burn. Yes, you read that right. Burn will now be based on the same code that shipped the .NET Framework 4.0 to hundreds of thousands of Beta users.

Engineering

Snack Apps

This afternoon Dare Obasanjo tweeted a link with a comment that caught my eye, "The rise of software as entertainment instead of productivity - http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67". A quick warning before you follow that link: there are plenty of words in there NSFW. Expletives aside it triggered an interesting thought.