WiX v3.6 Release Candidate available.

Today we released WiX v3.6 RC. You may remember that less than two months ago we released "Release Candidate Zero". Well, we are back with fewer bugs than ever before (5) asking for you to download this release and tell us how WiX v3.6 is doing. At this point, the feature are all complete and we expect they just work. So what's left?

Everything is looking very good so there are only three areas:

  1. Bugs - there are five bugs. I expect those will fall quickly and we will mop up whatever follows. The triage bar is going up now though so expect more bugs to be pushed to WiX v3.7 or later.
  2. Documentation - not much progress has been made on documentation. The focus was bugs. With bugs low, I expect documentation will improve slowly.
  3. WiX Standard Bootstrapper Application - works a bit better and is a bit more configurable. It still looks just okay. Still an area I hope we can do something to improve.

Getting Burn stable is obviously very important. This is a v1 feature in the WiX toolset and it ships "on CD" so it needs to be right. That's our focus and right now everything looks positive. Try out WiX v3.6 RC and let us know what's left. There are only a few months left.

In the meantime, keep coding. You know we are.

14 Comments

Comment by David Drake on Tuesday, May 29, 2012 4:21 PM

Now that Burn has been added to the mix, is it possible to have the Tools diagram (Found here: http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/tools.htm) updated to include everything that has been added/changed since 2007?

Comment by J W on Tuesday, June 5, 2012 4:03 PM

I tripped on a limitation of WiX 3.0 and it appears to still be present through the latest 3.6 release candidate.

It appears that using source file paths containing unicode characters outside of the local codepage support causes light.exe to throw a FileNotFound exception.

From what I could tell, it seems to be related to the way the file paths are converted before being passed to the underlying cabinet.dll APIs (since those APIs seem to be restricted to simple ansi strings).

Would this be considered a bug, or a scenario that you wouldn't want to support in WiX?

Comment by Ricky Rudy on Wednesday, June 6, 2012 7:15 AM

Awesome...love the new wix 3.6 bootstrapper feature. Would it be possible to allow splashscreen/logo files and branding information to be configured without rebuilding the bootstrapper?

Comment by J W on Wednesday, June 6, 2012 10:06 AM

My previous comment was incorrect. It's not the source files on the path, it's if the wixobj file is on that kind of path and that path is passed as part of the command line to light. Even when invoked programmatically using the .NET Process class.

Comment by Jacob Moonen on Saturday, June 9, 2012 2:22 AM

What happened to util:RemoveFolderEx? I was hoping to see it in 3.6 RC, but it seems to have been removed (or was it never there in the first place)?

Comment by Eugenco on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 7:53 PM

What about rich UI?

Comment by Rob Mensching on Thursday, June 21, 2012 11:23 AM

Jacob, RemoveFolderEx is part of WiX-contrib (http://wixcontrib.codeplex.com) not the core WiX toolset.

Comment by Rob Mensching on Thursday, June 21, 2012 11:25 AM

Eugenco, I don't know what "rich UI" you are referring to. The new bootstrapper infrastructure provided by Burn allows you to create a highly customized installation UI if that is what you are looking at. You can see how we customized our UI for the WiX install itself using the same framework.

Comment by Bob Arnson on Friday, July 13, 2012 7:48 PM

RemoveFolderEx is in WiX v3.6 in WixUtilExtension.

Comment by Mark Willcox on Thursday, July 26, 2012 9:20 AM

Hi, I was wondering is the WiX v3.6 RC Installer written in WiX itself ? I like the look and feel of this installer front end and would like to employ similar GUI techniques on an WiX installation I'm working on

Comment by Rob Mensching on Sunday, July 29, 2012 10:23 PM

Mark, yes, the WiX toolset's installation package is built using the same build it installs.

Comment by Mark Willcox on Monday, July 30, 2012 6:57 AM

Thanks Rob, What tools would I need to compile the build in the wix36-sources.zip file

Comment by Blake Niemyjski on Monday, August 13, 2012 1:31 PM

When is 3.6 shipping? Since VS2012, .NET 4.5 and Windows 8 have rtmed, it would be nice to have an official rtm of 3.6...

Comment by Rob Mensching on Monday, August 13, 2012 4:47 PM

Blake, see: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/8/6/WiX-Toolset-v3.6-nears-completion

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