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Trick or treat, WiX v3.5 Release Candidate.

# by Rob Mensching on Friday, October 29, 2010 10:52 PM

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This morning we released WiX v3.5.2229.0 as the Release Candidate for WiX v3.5! After I wrote the state of the WiX toolset in October, the team re-focused our efforts and worked the bug count down to 5. That definitely puts us in striking distance for a Production Release of WiX v3.5 at the end of the year.

After writing the about the attention split WiX v3.5 and v3.6 were causing, I decided to let Burn idle for a bit and attack v3.5 bugs to help Eric. Mike and Fredrik joined in and three weeks later we ended with 3 doc issues and 2 COM+ custom action bugs. I still can’t believe we have so few bugs left.

Now we need your help. Install WiX v3.5. File any bugs you find. We’re looking for the showstopper issues that would prevent us from calling WiX v3.5 done. We want to be done but we don’t want to miss something important. So, pick up the latest release and try it out.

Oh, and keep coding... you know we are!

 

10 Comments

Comment by Nick on Saturday, October 30, 2010 11:50 PM

I just downloaded, installed and upgraded to Visual Studio 2010. This was the last thing I was waiting for to make the switch. Everything worked great.

Comment by Igor on Monday, November 01, 2010 2:16 AM

Great news!!! Could not wait for the final release! Many thanks to the Wix team and to you, Rob!

And as usual I have question: Does it mean that Wix 3.5 can be released with this two COM+ custom action issues in it? I just wonder, because I entered one of this COM+ issues (and it is kind of show stopper for us, because we are building our assemblies with .Net 3.5 (to allow customers to downgrade if needed to 3.5), but aim installer to always install only with 4.0. And we currently blocked by 3097360 issue.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Monday, November 01, 2010 7:10 AM

Igor, maybe. Fredrik (the only person that understands COM+) is working on the bugs but COM+ is challenging stuff and I'm not sure how long I'd hold the release of all the other good stuff for these two bugs. Fortunately, COM+ is also very isolated so we can take fixes there without fear of breaking more core functionality.

I'll definitely mention this bug to Fredrik and Eric. If there are no other bugs, they will be the focus.

Comment by Igor on Monday, November 01, 2010 8:31 AM

Thank you for quick response! It is nice to know what is on a plate. COM+ is really challenging one, every time when I hit COM+ is something scary :)

BTW that issue is not really COM+ related, it is trying to call managed code from native dll and process (I believe it is msiexec) doesn't have config file with supported runtime set to both versions of .Net CLRs. I tried to look into Wix source code and I could not mind with any solution, but I believe you guys more clever than I do and you are closer to .Net team and maybe they can suggest something.

Comment by Christopher Painter on Monday, November 01, 2010 3:23 PM

Can you have 3.0 and 3.5 installed at the same time?

Comment by Rob Mensching on Monday, November 01, 2010 8:32 PM

Igor, yeah, I understand but it's in the COM+ custom action code and the mere fact that it touches the COM+ APIs makes it scary. ;) Unfortunately, the code doesn't look laid out well to handle this case so, again, we'll see.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Monday, November 01, 2010 8:34 PM

Christopher, no. We do not support side-by-side installations of the WiX toolset today. Yes, it'd be nice to have but not in the cards for WiX v3.x.

Of course, if you use the binary drop (the .zip file) you can have as many copies (of whatever versions) as you like.

Comment by Christopher Painter on Tuesday, November 02, 2010 7:26 AM

That makes it all but impossible for us to adopt 3.5 at this time. We have dozens of products at various phases of their life cycle and we can't just push them all forward to a new version of WiX.

We do virtualize our build environment so that's not the problem but the developer machines need to be able to have 3.0 and 3.5 installed just like we do with Visual Studio ( 98, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2010 ) and InstallShield ( 12, 2008, 2009 and 2010 ).

Perhaps I'll have to consider doing my own installer based on the ZIP that only registers 3.5 with VS2010 while leaving 3.0 registered with VS2008. That might work for us.

Comment by Pally Sandher on Thursday, November 04, 2010 9:44 AM

Might want to mention this in some other places. The first I knew of v3.5 being upgraded to release candidate was a mention on wix-users. Neither the sourceforge nor codeplex pages have any mention of this at all. I've been using v3.5 for a while now so it's no big deal for me, just another weekly release but I expect there are people who have been holding off upgrading due to the "beta" label (recent wix-users posts which both of us have contributed to back that up) & this may give them more incentive to make the switch.

Comment by Ran Davidovitz on Thursday, November 04, 2010 10:45 AM

at the personal level i love creating isolated solution that do not require anything but VS to get compiled.
is it possible to deploy all the wix binaries in a solution folder and update the relevant target (+ copy to the solution) so that all the references are made in the sandbox of the solution (this will produce isolated products that can be compiled on every location)?

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