Rob Mensching's Blog - page 31

A head cold is totally wiping me out right now but I wanted to post a few quick notes about progress on the WiX toolset.

Yesterday was April Fool's Day. Jenny's family has a long history of playing jokes on that day. My family does not. As a result, I'm not particularly good at pulling off an elaborate (or even simple) practical joke and Jenny has her guard up all day. This year was different.

So after 9 years of challenges and triumphs I have finally decided it is time to step away from Microsoft. I had a blast at Microsoft's Open Source Day 2008 (also told by John Lam) and after it all I felt like I had accomplished a lifetime's worth of achievements. It is now time to seek out new challenges.

The end of my first ever Scrum Sprint is impending. For the last three weeks (of a six week Sprint) I have been scrambling to get all the pieces of my part of the puzzle complete. Why is it a scramble instead of a nice run through the backlog? Because various pieces didn't come together well (i.e. the way I though they would) in the beginning.

After having Outlook completely "forget" to update a couple of my feed subscriptions I decided it was time to go back to RSS Bandit. Once installed I found that RSS Bandit had added a few feeds that I had long discarded.

On the day of the "great blog power outage", I entered my first year as a "thirtysomething". Jenny and I were off relaxing on the San Juan islands. It was a wonderful three day trip of doing basically nothing. It isn't very often that I have a time where the greatest goal for a day is reading a few more pages in a book of fiction. In this case, Pattern Recognition.

It hasn't been a great couple months for my uptime here.

I am happy to declare that the WiX toolset is now at Development Status: 5 - Production/Stable. I have had a few people urging this upgrade in status for a while so about a week ago Joe and I did the required project maintenance to get the right bits (v2.0.5805.0) posted to the right places on SourceForge. Everything seems to be working so I'm finally comfortable posting publicly on my blog.