Rob Mensching's Blog - page 23

Tonight was another good night for the WiX toolset. We're down one more bug from last week leaving us with 6 bugs.

I have to admit, this week I was worried that we weren't going to be able to meet last week's bug count for the WiX toolset.

Quiet night of bug fixing here.

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.

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.