WiX v3.7 released.

# by Rob Mensching on Monday, December 24, 2012 4:00 PM

tags: wix,

Happy Holidays! It is my pleasure to announce that the WiX toolset v3.7 is now officially declared Production/Stable. The final build number is v3.7.1224.0. You can download it from here.

From the beginning WiX v3.7 was designed to be short release. It adds a couple small features to Burn that didn't quite make it into WiX v3.6 and fixes a number of bugs that didn't fit in the WiX v3.6 release. The largest change in WiX v3.7 is the complete redo of the build system that eschews NAnt in favor of MSBuild everywhere.

Quick recap:

MSBuild-based build system - it's all MSBuild everywhere. Much cleaner, much more robust, much better system to take us forward.
Bundle self-update - a BootstrapperApplication can indicate to the Burn engine that a newer version of the Bundle is available so that Burn can download and launch that install instead. You can see this feature in action with the WiX v3.7 install itself. Just grab and older build and watch the button in the left corner.
Bundle reference-counting - MSI and (thanks to a bug fix in v3.7) MSP packages are automatically reference counted by the Burn engine. In WiX v3.7 you can specify a stable dep:ProviderKey for your Bundle and other Bundles be able to reference count it. Great if you want to ship redistributables as Bundles. There is a bug open for WiX v3.8 to make this a bit more automatic.

It feels great to get this release out on time (we wanted to get it done this year) with these features. I wish we would have fixed more bugs but that is pretty much always true. We'll just have to pick up fixing more bugs in WiX v3.8.

In the meantime, keep coding. You know I am!

13 Comments

Comment by Immo Landwerth on Monday, December 24, 2012 11:16 PM

Awesome! That's a nice Christmas gift. Now stop coding and enjoy the holidays :-)

Comment by Bernhard Reinisch on Saturday, December 29, 2012 1:11 PM

Many Thanks ... :-) Would you mind to add some description at your website for "How to author product dependencies"

http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/author_product_dependencies.htm

Comment by John Lueders on Friday, January 18, 2013 9:24 PM

Looking forward to using this. Thank you! Visual Studio 2012, does not have its Installer projects, so I hope this is easy (relatively) to implement quickly.

Comment by Tamas Somogyi on Thursday, February 7, 2013 5:58 AM

Hi, Thanks for the release, I'm new to Wix and look forward using it. However it would be good to mention that wix37.exe needs ProjectAggregator2.msi. First when I tried to install it ended with message "Failed. Try again?" - without any diagnostic info or Event Log entry. Finally I had to run Wireshark to find out it is looking for this msi... Before that I downloaded wix37-binaries.zip and tried to extract with 7zip, it said unknown compression methods for many files...

Comment by PeterM on Monday, February 11, 2013 8:03 PM

It appears 3.7 sources download may be corrupted. WinZip complains about 32Bit CRC mismatch between local and central headers. Sources for 3.6 are fine.

Comment by Vijayakumar on Tuesday, February 12, 2013 7:49 PM

Could not build the wix project in VS2008. Error says the application assembly built with more later version of framework whichvs2008 does not support!

Comment by Trond Andersen on Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:18 AM

I haven't found any documentation regarding how to use the upgrade feature in 3.7.

Hasn't this feature been documented yet? If so - any (preferably simple) samples that I could look at to see this upgrade feature in action?

Comment by bgavin on Tuesday, March 12, 2013 7:15 AM

I downloaded both the Binaries and Source ZIP files. Both ZIP files report corrupted central directories.
WinZIP 16.5 64-bit edition.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Tuesday, March 12, 2013 8:01 AM

bgavin, try opening using Windows Explorer. I know that works. There have been reports that other Zip tools are looking for something special that our.zip files are missing.

Comment by Mark E. Scott Jr. on Friday, March 22, 2013 11:05 AM

One thing to note that I ran into using windows explorer instead of 7zip for this problem, Windows sets the security flag that must be unblocked ("This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer"). This flag causes builds to fail when it attempts to run candle.exe, in a non-obvious manner (Visual Studio complete crash). I only figured it out when I dropped to command line build with msbuild. 7zip didn't set this flag.

Visual studio said "Could not load file or assembly (file:///........candle.exe' or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported"

Comment by Victory on Friday, April 5, 2013 6:27 PM

I encountered the same problem mentioned by "Vijayakumar" above. Wix 3.7 crashes with Visual Studio 2008. So, I went back to Wix 3.6.

Comment by Vaibhav on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 8:24 AM

I am using Wix 3.7 with VS 2008 and I am trying to add a reference to few WiX dlls so that i can work with UI in my installation. however, I get the following error for each of the following files that i add reference to:

WixUIExtension.dll
WixUtilExtension.dll
WixNetFxExtension.dll
"A reference to C:\Program Files (x86)\WiX Toolset v3.7\WixNetFxExtension.dll could not be added. Please make sure that the file is accessible, and that it is a valid WiX Reference."

Also, before I started thinking about moving to a UI based interface, there is no issue with the Wix installer that I am creating; it compiles and installs absolutely fine.

Please note that I am able to add reference to the same files in VS2012 and VS2010.

Comment by Kenneth Clausen on Friday, May 17, 2013 6:14 AM

I was unable to find this update within Visual Studio 2012. If it is currently not possible, I would recommend it.

Personally I think it is a nice way to be notified when updates are available. Especially if you have many extensions installed.

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

WiX v3.7 released.

13 Comments