WiX v3.5 released.

It is my pleasure to announce that WiX toolset v3.5 is now officially declared Production/Stable. The final build number is 3.5.2519.0. You can download it from here.

WiX v3.5 delivers official support for Visual Studio 2010 and IIS7. The standard UI also supports a quite few more languages (but not all of those) and we simplified the WiX language a bit. Plus there are a bunch of bug fixes in WiX v3.5 that makes this release the best version of the core WiX toolset ever released.

Unfortunately, Burn was again postponed to the next release. Also, it is important to note that Votive in WiX v3.5 does not install side by side with WiX v3.0. This is an unfortunate design issue that we hope is fixed for WiX v3.5 upgrades to WiX v3.6.

I would also like to take a moment and note that WiX releases are speeding up. WiX v3.0 took us something like 4 years to complete. WiX v3.5 took half that time (about 2 years). WiX v3.6 is looking like it will take about half that again (about 1 year). WiX v4.0 will big a major version release (so it won't be half again) but we heard the message about smaller releases more often.

Your praise and thanks should mostly be directed to Eric St. John who almost singlehandedly finished WiX v3.5. Also, Candy Chiang drove the whole release so I could focus on Burn and WiX v3.6. Those two plus the rest of the WiX crew hope you enjoy WiX v3.5.

Happy 2011 and keep coding. You know I am.

tags: rob, mensching, wix, 3.5, released, production, stable

22 Comments

Comment by David on Monday, January 31, 2011 10:11 AM

Congratulations with this important milestone!! Keep up the good work.

Comment by Jack on Monday, January 31, 2011 3:58 PM

Awesomeness...my thanks to the WiX team and community!

Comment by Peter Hull on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 2:17 AM

Sorry if this is obvious but I couldn't find it - is there a document which lists all the updates to the WiX language from 3.0 to 3.5 and how to upgrade the .wxs files?

Comment by Petr Pechovic on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 4:52 AM

Good news :) Thanks!

Comment by Rob Mensching on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 6:30 AM

@Peter Hull, WiX v3.5 will read WiX v3.0 files with no problem. There are just some simplifications, like the MajorUpgrade element, that are available in WiX v3.5. Sadly, it doesn't look like we did a good job tracking the individual improvements in WiX v3.5. I'll look at trying to add some documentation to make it clearer.

However, if you have working WiX v3.0 code you should be able to upgrade to WiX v3.5 toolset with no issues.

Comment by David on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 6:59 AM

Congrats! WiX is a great toolset and it just keeps getting better ... I'm really looking forward to v3.6 and anxious to see what v4.0 has in store.

Congratulations [again] on a job very well done and here's to you, the team and the product: may you all have long, bright and interesting futures!

Comment by Shaun on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 10:39 AM

Excellent - just excellent! WiX is probably the best thing to ever happen to installations ever. Your long hours and hard work are most appreciated.

Comment by Sreeram on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 10:27 AM

Congrats! Thanks Rob & team for the release

Comment by Ramon Herrera on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 2:46 PM

Rob,

What can we expect in the future regarding the ability to have side-by-side installations of different releases of WiX/Votive? Keep up the great work.

Comment by Igor on Friday, February 4, 2011 2:50 AM

Thanks Rob and Wix team!!!

You have created a really good product!
Looking forward to Wix 3.6 and Burn especially.

Comment by Helge on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 4:34 AM

Many thanks to all the team for this great product!

I have only started using WiX a year ago, but I immediately liked it. Looking forward to Burn, a bootstrapper is the only thing I really miss.

Comment by Dave on Thursday, February 17, 2011 7:56 AM

Thanks for another great release.

With regards to SourceForge, are things still active there? I want to add my voice to this feature request to add a WorkingDirectory argument to CAQuietExec (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1768504&group_id=105970&atid=642717), but don't know if that is still an active site.

Comment by Oskar on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 12:16 AM

Nice!

How about adding a news item about the release on the WIX website? :)

Comment by Mazlan on Monday, March 14, 2011 1:07 AM

Hi, I just using Wix 3.5 with Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7. I unable to make a custom Preprocessor Extension run. I create the extension project. and copy the dll into Wix 3.5 program files and also set the Reference Path in the extension project properties but the Wix project build still failed with "undefined preprocessor function" of my extension. Am I missing something? Google can't answer me.

Comment by Jonathan on Saturday, April 16, 2011 4:54 AM

Thanks a bunch for such an awesome product. I reviewed 3.0 for my company a while back but couldn't get it to play nice with VS 2008 and MSBuild and CruiseControl and Generating BootStrappers and and and... You get the idea! I don't think I put in enough effort.

But WiX 3.5 and Vs 2010 is awesome! After two days of solid work I can do all the things that VS Setup Project couldn't do, like installing an application in the main directory and a service in a sub folder, with both apps using the same common projects and Dll dependencies.

Comment by Chris on Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:27 AM

I hope this is not a stupid question but where/how do we file a bug report on the 3.6 beta? I didn't see anything at codeplex for that and the sourceforge site is clearly marked as "moved" (http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/project/wix/ReadMe.html). If I've missed it, please provide a link and some instructions.

Thanks.

Comment by Chris on Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:30 AM

Nevermind... I just found it on a second look. It's on the homepage at Codeplex, http://wix.codeplex.com/ "File a bug" link.

Comment by Scott Ferguson on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 10:59 PM

I am unable to get this to work on Visual Studio 2005 64 bit.

I installed the ProjectAggregator2.msi first and then Wix35.msi.

The WiX template is not available when I create a new project.

I noticed it installs to the 32 bit directory, does this mean it doesn't work for 64 bit VS 2005?

Comment by Rob Mensching on Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:09 AM

Scott, according to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951801 there is no 64-bit VS 2005. I recommond contacting the wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net mailing list for specific help with your issue.

Comment by Scott Ferguson on Thursday, November 10, 2011 4:28 AM

Thanks for the mailing list. I'll post my question there.

I made the switch to a 64 bit machine more that 6 months ago and have been programming mainly in VS 2005 for that time.

I can see where my statement was misleading, to be more precise I should have said I'm using VS 2005 in a 64 bit environment.

Thanks again for the mailing list and responding.

Comment by Keith Miller on Monday, December 5, 2011 6:50 PM

Thanks for all the hard work. My group within our rather large software company dropped InstallShield for WiX a couple of years ago and have never looked back. As far as I know the whole company has standardized on WiX.

Comment by Smitty on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 5:50 AM

I'm not sure, but I think it's possible to make WIX even more complicated than it already is. I'm hopeful that version 4.0 will include so many new features that absolutely nobody will ever be able to understand how it works. Then perhaps my foolish company will switch to a much simpler installer, like NSIS. Then, rather than spend several man days configuring (and debugging) a single application's XML files, we can spend that time developing our software, or maybe even going home to get some sleep.

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

22 Comments