Rob Mensching's Blog - page 25

WiX

Release Candidate defined.

A week+ ago, I posted a blog entry noting that the WiX toolset was out of beta not in it. I also mentioned that we are now in the "release candidate" mode and provided a quick definition to differentiate it from "beta" mode. A few days later Steven Sinofsky posted a entire blog entry about Windows 7 entering the Release Candidate milestone. In typical Sinofsky-style, Steven posted a much longer definition of release candidate and placed it in context with the other typical milestones at Microsoft.

WiX

WiX v3.5 status or the lack thereof.

There was a comment on my WiX toolset bug count entry asking about the status of WiX v3.5 and more importantly the bootstrapper often referred to as Burn. The short answer is there is no status to report. Work on WiX v3.5 has not started in earnest because we are all focused on addressing the bugs in WiX v3.

We had another bug bounce this week in the WiX toolset but the bugs were more distributed this time (i.e. the bugs weren't all fallout from the IIS7 CustomAction changes). Unfortunately, we did not make as much progress as last week and ended up with one more bug total. That's definitely not the trend we want to be following but finding the bugs now is better than finding the bugs later.

We had quite a bug bounce this week. Most of the bugs were regressions from the last couple weeks of major work plus some triage by Bob and Candy through Votive bugs. Yet somehow we still managed to finish the night with a lower bug count than last week.

WiX

WiX toolset is out of beta not in it.

There was some confusion on December 5th when Bob provided highlights for the WiX toolset "beta exit" build. I saw a number of people declaring the WiX toolset finally "in beta". That's not quite right. The WiX toolset was in beta for all of last year as we worked through the feature set and quality bar. As 2008 came to a close it felt like WiX v3 was a solid improvement over WiX v2 and the quality markedly improved.

WiXSetup

WiX toolset supports MSI 5.0.

Two weekends ago, Windows 7 beta builds were made available. That meant the new MSI SDK was available on MSDN with all the information about what's new in MSI 5.0.aspx). In turn, that meant we had some work to do to teach the WiX toolset some new tricks.

I just fixed the first bug in my new RobMensching.Blog engine. When I finally got around to running the engine's new feed through the Feed Validator. I had tested subscribing to the feed with IE's built in feed rendering as well RSS Bandit and Live Writer. But, of course, the Feed Validator found two more issues.

Personal

Now running RobMensching.Blog.

After a couple bumps this morning, I finally upgraded my blog to the brand new RobMensching.Blog engine. All of the old links should redirect to their new location, especially the feed subscription link, so no need to worry about updating your links. However, if you are subscribed to my feed you probably saw a few duplicate entries show up since the RobMensching.Blog engine generates entry/@ids differently than Subtext.