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WiX v3.x schedule, RTM and beyond.

# by Rob Mensching on Saturday, April 18, 2009 12:29 PM

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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.

The Proposal

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.

The Reality

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.

The Call to Action

Landing this project in July is going to require something akin to Joker's mad piloting skills. Bob just called out our WiX RC2 but you don't have to stop there. You can subscribe and install every drop of the WiX toolset. I understand that integrating new builds can be expensive for some of you but whatever you can do helps. At least, verifying that your primary scenarios work with as many drops as possible and filing any bugs you hit in them is key for us finish with confidence.

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.

 

6 Comments

Comment by Christopher Painter on Saturday, April 18, 2009 6:44 PM

Sounds like a great plan Rob. If there is anything that I can offer, please feel free to call on me.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Sunday, April 19, 2009 1:37 PM

Thanks, Christopher. Please see the call to action above on how you can best help us finish WiX v3.0.

Comment by Christopher Painter on Sunday, April 19, 2009 6:10 PM

I've read it and you are right, it's expensive for us to keep up with weekly releases. We have to CM and security review the drops, get it approved by technology review boards, piloted on an integration branch and then finally put in place on 30+ build virtual machines which is currently (sadly) a manual process of managing the snapshots and installing software. By the time this is all done there's usually a new weekly release ready to go.

But I do have a TFS server at home so I'll keep up with the Votive and DTF core stories as much as I can after hours.

Comment by Matthew Rowan on Monday, April 20, 2009 3:36 PM

This is the best news and result to come out of the very disappointing news of WiX not shipping with Visual Studio 2010.

Good work guys.

Comment by David Cumps on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:37 AM

I'm very curious to see more on that bootstrapper in 3.5.

Will it support multi instance functionality to install an MSI package multiple times?

Comment by Rob Mensching on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 9:46 AM

@Matthew Rowan, thanks. Decoupling from VS allowed me to really reevaluate. This proposal did seem like the "next best path" forward. I'm encouraged that you agree.

@David Cumps, multi-instance support will not be a key feature in the first version of the bootstrapper. It is on the list of things to do but the core scenario we must get right first is download/install/upgrade ".NET Framework" + "SQL Express" + "MSI" + "MSI" + "MSI" + ... with a good UI. With that foundation we'll figure out the priority for the next set of features. Burn is coming soon, I'll have more details once WiX v3.0 is put to bed.

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