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WiX toolset bug count after March 26th, 2009.

# by Rob Mensching on Friday, March 27, 2009 4:12 AM

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I skipped the progress report for the WiX toolset last week and had a couple people ask about the count. So I guess a couple people are finding this data useful. Anyway, the short answer is that the bug count is down from 26 two weeks ago but steady from last week at 22.

Despite treading water, there are two big positive trends I see on the horizon. First, one of the hard open issues I've been worried about for a long while is seeing traction. In this case, I'm talking about handling fallback languages with .wxl files in MSBuild. Hopefully next week the solution will be functional.

Second, Jason has turned his attention on the Votive backlog and we're starting to see those bugs drop. We even had a surprise visit by Justin tonight and he's started looking into the VS2005 integration issues. If all continues, Votive will be in very good shape in a month or three.

Sadly, this was likely Bob's last meeting with us in Redmond before he heads off to Boston. While his presence here will definitely be missed, I am excited to see how "WiX East" develops. I'm also hoping with Bob remote we can get a bit more data about how to distribute culture.

In the meantime, keep coding... you know we are.

 

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4 Comments

Comment by Mark on Friday, March 27, 2009 9:54 AM

Keep up the good work. I still use WiX 2.0, but I am looking forward to the day when 3.0 is production ready (or maybe it already is?).

Comment by Christopher Painter on Friday, March 27, 2009 2:34 PM

I'm stepping on things that aren't production ready but it's close. Either way I need it to at least be named RTM/GA/Production. to get around some red tape at work. Funny how technology review boards don't want to hear how WiX's beta is more reliable then InstallShields service packs. And if I manage to convince them I look stupid as hell when something like DTF invocation breaks.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Sunday, March 29, 2009 12:01 PM

@Christopher, even after we declare RTM/Production there will likely be bugs we definitely wished we fixed. That's the tight rope we have to walk. Although, honestly, if we hit a bad bug, we'd do the reissue the release. Quite a morale hit when we do that, so I'd like to get it perfect the first time. That said, I know everyone wants us to get the release out as soon as possible. That makes the tight rope all the more narrow.

Comment by Christopher Painter on Monday, March 30, 2009 6:07 AM

Re: morale hit; I wouldn't take it personally. Sure, we all try to make sure the quality is great when we ship but lessons are learned, requirements change and bugs are found. As long as you have a great servicing strategy then it's easy to recover. But I suspect the real issue is how that servicing strategy fits with delivering to the VS team.

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