Drive to a WiX v2 toolset final release.

Tonight the core WiX toolset virtual team made a concerted effort to reduce the number of open WiX v2 bugs.  At the time of this writing we have 8 bugs.  I hope to kill off one more and Bob is looking at another.  That would leave us with 6 CustomAction bugs that need to be solved.  Then I'll feel pretty comfortable calling WiX v2 done.

The CustomActions have always been more work to implement, debug and fix.  It isn't just that they are written in C++ (the rest of the WiX toolset is written in C#) but the problems being solved in the CustomActions are harder.  Creating actions that participate properly in a compensating transaction takes a lot of effort.  The effort that pays off once we get it right because no one ever has to write it again.  Developers can write a couple lines of declarative statements and have a transacted installation process.

Anyway, that's just a quick update on what's going on tonight.  Also, power is back on at home so I'll be sleeping in my own bed tonight... and it'll be warm.  Keep coding, I'm going to kill off this bug and call it a night.

5 Comments

Comment by Wictor Wilen on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 12:11 AM

Rob Mensching blogs that the WiX version 2 is nearly done, just a few more bugs to slay. Two of the remaining bugs, about dropping/overwriting Sql databases, are important to me so when they are done...

Comment by とっちゃん's Blog on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 1:20 AM

WiX ついにファイナル?

Comment by Peter on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 6:36 PM

I just started using WIX a few days ago...pretty cool stuff. I noticed you mentioned that there are some bugs in Custom Actions left to be squashed and I was wondering if what I'm currently encountering is one of them. My msi creates a new website in IIS and a virtual directory under that. Everything works fine if I hard code the website description, hostheader and port into the wxs. But if I have the user enter that data via a dialog box, the app installs fine but it crashes when it uninstalls and nothing is removed. The error message is "Failed to read IIsWebs table (-2147024883)". Is this a bug or am I just doing things wrong. I based my code off the tutorial on SourceForge.com.

Thanks for any help and keep up the good work!

Comment by Rob Mensching on Friday, December 29, 2006 3:08 PM

Peter, it sounds like you are using Properties that are not defined during uninstall. You need to persist the Properties and then load them during uninstall so that the CustomActions can remove the correct website. This has been asked before in the wix-users mailing list. Check out the archive.

Comment by Joan on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 8:45 AM

how can i persist the properties, because i have the same problem.

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