Rob Mensching's Blog - page 30

I forgot to mention last week that my blog was going to be down over the weekend. I'm on a free ISP so I don't complain when they say, "We're going to go down over the weekend to upgrade the electrical system in our building. Your email will be cached and sent when we come back up Monday."

A couple weeks ago I posted a blog entry that I had mentally labeled "the lead balloon experiment" even before I finished. In that entry, I asked the question, "Should consistent inflammatory remarks be ignored or is it important to address the remarks to present the other side of the issue and attempt to debate the underlying issues?" I got some great feedback and wanted to roll it up here.

Like almost all Thursday nights, I was out with the guys writing code for the WiX toolset. Also, like almost all Thursday nights, Jenny called me before she headed off to bed. Sadly, tonight she informed me that her Zune had frozen on her walk to work this morning.

Someone asked recently how to use an ampersand (&) in the Product Name for their .wxs file.

I just couldn't focus tonight so I went surfing for recent blog entries and web pages talking about the WiX toolset. Usually, I can search for wix` and find some interesting things that either need to be fixed or documented better or sometimes a success story. Unfortunately, tonight I tripped across a troll post.

Today I finally worked out the final issues blocking the latest release of the WiX toolset. There were several small bugs in the release batch files that just took time to run down. There is a fair bit of remaining clean up work for me to do but I am pretty sure that the worst has passed and weekly releases will be back on track.

I couldn't sleep tonight so I thought I'd just poke around online for a while. It turned out to be impossible to miss the fact that the Google App Engine was released tonight. We knew about this a little while ago but now we know it's name.

Today, four years ago the WiX toolset was released as the first Open Source project from Microsoft. Each year I like to take a moment and look around to see where we are. Just this week, I've found two random blog entries that make me believe we're being successful.