Rob Mensching's Blog - page 23

WiX

WiX v3.x schedule, RTM and beyond.

Jenny and I invited Bob over for dinner the week before he moved east. He and I spent much of the time talking about new plans for the WiX toolset since Visual Studio decided to not ship it. I had a proposal and wanted to vet it with him. By the end of the evening Bob liked the idea so I ran it by the Visual Studio team. Candy worked up a full proposal and last week they agreed.

Whew. After a relatively easy bug night last week, getting under 10 bugs in the WiX toolset felt like a real effort tonight. The big changes we made in the last few weeks (like heat and language fallback support in MSBuild) are still regressing and a couple extension bugs caught us by surprise.

Ten. Not quite single digits but as close as you can get without actually being there. That's the bug count in the WiX toolset tonight. Fantastic effort across the board.

WiX

Open Source WiX toolset turns 5.

Five years ago today, the WiX toolset was released to SourceForge as the first Open Source project from Microsoft. Roughly five years before that, I wrote the first lines of the WiX toolset were written. That means for almost a decade, I've been leading the effort to create a set of tools that integrate seamlessly into development environments to create Windows Installer packages from a text based source format. Even though I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the next steps for the WiX toolset, I want spend today looking back.

Morale took a hit this week with the announcement that the WiX toolset will not be shipping in Visual Studio. Productivity was slightly affected but a couple noteworthy bugs in the WiX toolset were fixed. We also ended down one more bug at 21. Not bad for a pretty painful week.

It was almost two years ago when Visual Studio approached me about shipping the WiX toolset in Visual Studio. We built a plan that combined the efforts of program management, developers, testers, documentation and localization people from Visual Studio with the volunteer group to release the WiX toolset version 3.0 as part of Visual Studio 2010. We executed on that plan to deliver the WiX toolset as part of the Visual Studio 2010 CTP and were on track to deliver for Beta 1.

I skipped the progress report for the WiX toolset last week and had a couple people ask about the count. So I guess a couple people are finding this data useful. Anyway, the short answer is that the bug count is down from 26 two weeks ago but steady from last week at 22.

We had another good night of bug fixing in the WiX toolset. We started well above 30, with a couple more bugs in the MSI 5.0 implementation and some fallout from the large heat changes. The worst of those are fixed and we're back under 30 with 26 open bugs.