Quiet night of bug fixing here. Brian nuked the remaining heat bugs and Jason took care of the DTF bugs plus one Votive bug. Eric worked hard on the MSBuild issues and made progress but not quite ready to be checked in. Mike and I did a little performance work on "smart cabbing" that will get more detail in a later blog post. In the end we ended up with one bug less overall.
Jenny and I invited Bob over for dinner the week before he moved east. He and I spent much of the time talking about new plans for the WiX toolset since Visual Studio decided to not ship it. I had a proposal and wanted to vet it with him. By the end of the evening Bob liked the idea so I ran it by the Visual Studio team. Candy worked up a full proposal and last week they agreed.
Release WiX v3.0 on July 4th, 2009 with the core toolset, extensions and support for only Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Support for Visual Studio 2010 follows in WiX v3.5 with the new bootstrapper, burn. WiX v3.5 ships when Visual Studio 2010 ships.
July is an aggressive date for WiX v3.0 but it felt possible if we did not pull in the new Visual Studio 2010 support. You can see that fact in our bug count. Votive bugs continue to be a struggle for us but we're making progress and that progress would be disrupted when VS2010 support was integrated.
The comments (both public and private) when I announced that Visual Studio 2010 would not include the WiX toolset felt like validation of the proposal. We don't need more features in v3.0. We need to get stable. Then we need to get a move on to v3.5 and burn.
So that is what we are going to try to do.
Landing this project in July is going to require something akin to Joker's mad piloting skills
July is two and a half months away. That isn't a lot of time but I like the challenge and I like our odds. I know a lot of you are looking forward to a Production/Stable/RTM quality WiX v3.0 toolset and that many others are looking forward to WiX v3.5. We're working toward it.
So here's to the future. Keep coding, you know we are.
Whew. After a relatively easy bug night last week, getting under 10 bugs in the WiX toolset felt like a real effort tonight. The big changes we made in the last few weeks (like heat and language fallback support in MSBuild) are still regressing and a couple extension bugs caught us by surprise.
Fortunately, Mike did a killer job on the hard extension bug and Brian (heat) and Eric (MSBuild language fallback) did a fantastic job working through the regressions in their areas. Justin also finally ramped back into VS2005 and killed an old bug there. All in all, a good fight to drive our bug count below 10 for the first time ever. It's going to be a fight like this for a while as we slowly work towards a 48-hour zero bug goal. Lots of old Votive to get through first.
On a truly happy note, I now have verification of my new release plan for WiX v3.0. Expect to see that posted sometime over the weekend. I think you're going to like it.
10. Ten. Not quite single digits but as close as you can get without actually being there. That's the bug count in the WiX toolset tonight. Fantastic effort across the board.
The work started this afternoon when I met with Candy, Justin, Jason and Milen to evaluate all of the Votive bugs. A couple bugs were moved to later releases and we load balanced the remaining across the capable people (aka: not me). I feel much better about where we are with Votive now.
Then tonight Mike, Eric, Brian and Jason went to town tonight killing bugs across the whole space. When the dust settled there were only 10 bugs left. You can see it below. One solid blue disk representing 10 Votive bugs. On the side, Fredrik and I made a bit more progress on some Burn details. Amazing work by the team tonight.
Finally, I have a new release plan. I'm getting the final verifications now and will post that plan here very soon. In the meantime, bask in the pale blue glow of the 10 bug disk.
© 2009 RobMensching.com LLC. Powered by RobMensching.Blog using a slightly modified DePo Clean Theme.