Today we released WiX v3.6 RC0. If you are on the WiX v3.6 Beta or you were waiting for Burn to become fundamentally stable or you are looking for VS 11 support, this is a great time to upgrade. Core scenarios work and we do not expect any further breaking changes. At the same time, we are still fixing most bugs that are filed. That means if you do hit an issue in RC0, there is a good chance we can get the fix in before locking down. Wondering what's left?

There are four areas that I know still need attention. Not surprisingly they are all in Burn.

1. Patching - patching in Burn is actually pretty phenomenal. The slipstreaming and add-on behavior in Burn creates a very compelling story for patching via Bundles. Patching is also some of the most complicated code in Burn that unfortunately required the core scenarios to work correctly before it could be fully vetted. The fundamentals work now so we're flushing out edge cases and doing performance work.
2. Per-user - installing per-user packages was not a scenario we focused on in WiX v3.6. It shows with the bugs that are being filed against Burn now. However, I want us to get the fundamentals working so we're looking into those bugs.
3. Documentation - clearly fixing bugs (and just making things work) was our focus up to now. With functionality stabilizing we will now be filling in gaps in the documentation about Bundles, how to create your own Bootstrapper Application and other such stories.
4. WiX Standard Bootstrapper Application - the wixstdba covers the basics. It looks okay and it works okay. Any time we have left after getting the Burn engine rock solid will be spent polishing the wixstdba UI.

So, how is WiX v3.6 doing?

I was wondering the same thing so I asked one of our key partners for WiX v3.6: Visual Studio. The Visual Studio setup team gathers tons of metrics about their installs. They shipped the VS11 Beta on a build very close to the WiX toolset Beta. To make a long story short, if you factor out the few issues in the Beta that are bugs fixed in WiX v3.6 RC0 then VS11 Beta success rates are very close to (and maybe even better than) VS2010 RTM success rates!

In other words, things look very good and we have about 6 months left for the finishing touches. So, you keep coding, you know we are!