Frustrated.

# by Rob Mensching on Tuesday, August 03, 2010 11:03 PM

I'm am so frustrated right now.

We should have had WiX v3.5 with Burn done two months ago. Instead, my focus is split on two releases. WiX v3.5 is inching toward completion and painfully late for all those WiX users trying to migrate to VS2010. For me Burn in WiX v3.6 consumes every minute of afterhours programming.

All the while, more people show up to complain that the toolset is too complicated. I feel trapped delivering functionality a year (or more) late while two year old ideas on how to create a better future scratch at the back of my eyes.

I promised that I'd deliver WiX v3.6 code complete by September. However, the ever lingering bugs in WiX v3.5 make me wonder if I should drop all that to focus on finishing WiX v3.5. Another part of me thinks I should drop all this "legacy" junk and move to a clean world on VS2010, NETFX 4.0 and start building the antithesis of complicated (I've called it "Six" or "WiX PX" or "WiX Lite") that was prototyped a year or more ago.

But I won't break my promises so nothing will really change.

Ultimately, I just feel like I'm 3/4 of the way on everything. It is all coming together well but everything is time sliced in so fine, so minutely that progress is painfully slow.

That leaves me incredibly frustrated.

tags: rob, mensching, frustrated

20 Comments

Comment by Thomas Brock on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 12:18 AM

Q: Umm, brain surgery is hard. Can you give me a tool that makes it easy?

A: Not if it is my head you are going to be working on.

Wix is hard because MSI is hard. Compared to the hell I lived in during my InstallShield days, Wix is mana from heaven. If you think focusing on 3.5 would be better for most of your users, then do it. If not, stay on 3.6. While it might be fun to daydream about what might be in 4.0, that won't help you ship anything today.

Software is hard. I have been in your shoes many times, and I can sympathize. It will get better.

T

Comment by Keith on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 1:00 AM

Rob,

Please dotn forget that the tools you are creating, with support, are being used daily to support real users. You achievements in creating the WiX toolset are appreciated by an army of users on a daily basis. We know you dont get thanked as often you should and for that we are all to blame. Eventually you will see your vision come together, the process is always painful though.

A big thank you from a committed WiX user.

Keith

Comment by Will on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 1:02 AM

I don't think you should automatically assume that changing plans is 'breaking a promise'.

If a re-evaluation of current circumstances suggests that a some change is necessary, then go with it.

Comment by Eug on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 1:17 AM

Make sure you don't Burn out Rob ;)

I and lots of other people are very grateful for WiX, and we look forward to using it for more stuff in the future.

Comment by Joe on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 1:29 AM

Hi Rob,
you are doing great - WiX is a real helpfull project to many many developers out there which need to face a better setup than just xcopy. Keep up your work - we need it!

Comment by Philip Stears on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 1:44 AM

For what it's worth - I can't imagine life without the WiX toolset, it's completely changed the way I think about installation and taken most of the chore out of it. Sure it's a little complicated sometimes but the difficulty is more than bouyed out by the gains.

Keep up the great work - please, I and many others would be lost without it :-)

Comment by Samuel Jack on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 1:53 AM

I know how you feel Rob. But keep your spirits up. If it wasn't for Wix, I'd probably still be stuck with Visual Studio Setup projects! What you've done is tremendously valued, and everything else is a bonus!

Comment by Sean Hederman on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 2:23 AM

Rob, I hear your pain. It's always incredibly difficult to focus on a version when you've got so much cooler stuff coming down the pipeline for the next version.

The standard I always use is to try and focus on the users, what will provide real benefit to them the soonest? If that means kicking out the current version and focusing on the next one, then do it.

But usually it means hammering extra hard on the current version, and hope that the lessons you learn there will make the next version even better.

Comment by Neil Sleightholm on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 3:44 AM

I for one am very pleased that you are getting code fixed in 3.5 including the "legacy" junk. I would love to move to the "modern" world of VS2010 & NEXTFX4 but out here in the real world it just isn't happening.

I would love to see Burn working but I can get around that but installing to core technologies is what matters to me.

Keep up the good work, I for one appreciate it.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 6:26 AM

Thank you all for the encouragement. I didn't expect it but I definitely appreciate it.

After sleeping on my frustration, I've decided that I'm going to go dark for a couple weeks to focus on just getting done.

Comment by LukeB on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 9:12 AM

I just thought I'd chime in too. WiX is among the top 10 bits of useful software in my opinion ... right up there with vim, Visual Studio, etc etc.

You can't develop quality Windows software without it. Thanks for all your hard work.

Comment by Alan Low on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 2:52 PM

The work you and the others have done on WiX is excellent and made a big impact on the installers I produce for the company I work for. This toolset is better value than any of the commercial alternatives and the speed at which new features and bug fixes are developed with a relativity small team is outstanding and much appreciated by the community. I personally would love to see Burn, but would prefer to have WiX v3.5 out of Beta as it would be good to have a final release to go with VS 2010.

After that go nuts and do a full reboot for WiX v4.0 :)

Comment by Christopher Painter on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 3:11 PM

I've been working on a tool to help make WiX a lot easier. It's so easy that it's gone viral at work. I have a Chief Engineer say "This is the first in-house tool that I've ever used that I liked." I had another Dev-Lead say "It's so easy that I did it myself instead of dumping it on one of my junior developers."

I know from previous posts that Rob has indicated he hopes tools based on WiX will come from the community and I know from his InstallAware post what he thinks some of it's key attributes should be.

Well I think it's time that the community picks up the gauntlet to help solve this problem with a nice abstraction that people can use while letting Rob keep doing what he does best and grow the core toolset.

Comment by Kirk Erickson on Wednesday, August 04, 2010 5:22 PM

Thanks to wix we were able to easily create a host of installers easily. The users are now addicted to them and don't know that it was wix that made it possible.

Cheers

Comment by Rory MacLeod on Thursday, August 05, 2010 1:59 AM

I always find that if I split my time between two tasks, it takes longer to do both because of all the context switching that goes on. Maybe you'll be more productive and feel better if you focus on finishing v3.5 first, then move on to the next thing.

Comment by Alive on Thursday, August 05, 2010 2:02 AM

Hi Rob,

Just want to tank all of you guys at WiX team who make installation process much easier for us (WiX users).
God bless you all!

I know what you feel. I find myself in a simmilar situation. Supporting an old installer project (InstallAware) and wishing someday to totally rewrite all installations on WiX (waiting for Burn).

Thanks again for your colossal dedication to WiX!
We know you'll keep coding ;)

Comment by David on Friday, August 06, 2010 4:52 AM

Don't start again from scratch. WiX isn't perfect but you have a significant user base. Second, most of its imperfections finding their way up are directly MSI related, i.e. MSI imperfections. I'd say there's no better time to start an MSI replacement at Microsoft.

Comment by dB. on Friday, August 06, 2010 2:12 PM

My 0.02c is that that to avoid being frustrated one needs to be more agile. One of the key principles of being more agile is to deffer commitments. Don't spend time promising anything.

Comment by Richard B. on Wednesday, August 11, 2010 5:45 AM

Rob,

I just want to reverberate what everyone else here has stated already. Thank you for putting all your time into the WiX toolset?!?! Your toolset is what has finally taken my development to the next level. Without it, I was using Setup and Deployment projects, but was never quite happy with the overall workflow and (lack of) ease of use.

Now I have a great system that I can install complicated code in seconds. Yes, I as well as everyone else have gripes from time to time because of some weird thing that we need to overcome that takes too long, but dude... great product... esp. for a "free, as in beer" product none the less.

Looking forward to WiX 3.6, and to start using Burn, which is the largest piece of the puzzle.

I'm actually confused why others are using WiX for the web projects, when you have MSDeploy that seems to be a much better solution in those instances??

Comment by stefan on Wednesday, September 01, 2010 6:42 AM

Rob, we had to use Wise to create our setups for years - we recently started switching everything to WiX - and I must say WiX together with C# custom actions is already heaven compared to Wise. Don't be frustrated - take your time - we love your work!

RobMensching.com /Blog because setup isn't just xcopy

Frustrated.

20 Comments