WiX v2 entering escrow.
Last Thursday we (quietly) celebrated the 3rd anniversary of the WiX toolset. Throughout the night I was pounding on the last two WiX v2 bugs assigned to me. The fixes will show up this week's build (Friday morning). That leaves us with only one open v2 bug which has to do with some bizarre behavior of tallow on Vista.
Therefore this Friday, one year and one week after releasing the WiX toolset as Open Source, I’m going to put WiX v2 into escrow. This means that we will not touch the code or release any additional builds. We will just let people use the code for a month. The goal is to halt churn and get a feeling how stable the code is. The ultimate hope is that the build we enter escrow with is the final build of the WiX v2 toolset (I believe we could rebuild tallow for that last bug and not have it reset escrow on the rest of the toolset because tallow is so isolated).
WiX v2 escrow is a very big deal. First, this is (hopefully) the last step in providing a completely stable version of the WiX toolset for those users that want a known quantity. Of course, we’ll evaluate bugs and release service packs of the WiX v2 toolset if someone hits a really bad bug with no reasonable workaround. Second, with the WiX v2 toolset completed we can focus development on WiX v3. There are a lot of exciting features coming in WiX v3 (that are likely to make it unstable for the next six months or so) and we are all very much looking forward to being able to focus on it.
Tomorrow night, I’ll lay out the WiX v3 Roadmap. In the meantime, those of you that have standardized on the WiX v2 toolset have Friday to look forward to. Pick up the bits Friday afternoon and put them in your build. That should be the most stable version of the WiX toolset that we’ve ever released. Then send in your feedback so we can truly release the final build of the WiX v2 toolset.