Rob Mensching's Blog - page 20

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.

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.

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.

I follow Rob Conery irregularly because of his work on Subsonic. His comments about Subsonic development were useful in a time when I was trying to wrap my head around MVP, IoC, DAL and DTO.

I'm not big on New Year Resolutions. Not even when the year begins a new decade. However, the typical days off around the holidays do provide some time to stop and reflect. And the one thing that keeps coming to mind is that there are a lot of thoughts in my head that I would like to blog.

A while ago I started talking about culture around the WiX Toolset. I started (and ended) with turtles all the way down which was an early part of the WiX culture. A more recent addition to our culture (added in the last year or so) are the videos.

Never before today had I considered adding support for emoticons to my blog engine but this blog post almost screams for it. You should read the title as "WiX v3.5 hearts VS2010 Beta 2". Yep, our friends in Visual Studio delivered fix after fix in Votive to ensure that the WiX Toolset now supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta2.

Almost exactly a year ago, on the anniversary where I declared November 4th a personal holiday, I said I felt like I was at the end of the beginning. Today I decided that I have definitely completed the beginning. On Monday, I start the middle.