A name, or if you prefer identity, is a profoundly important concept in pretty much everything. In software deployment identities serve as the foundation for versioning and dependencies which are pretty much everything for us. In ancient Egyptian mythology, Isis was granted power over the all powerful sun god, Ra, when he told her his true name. Ra gave Isis a bunch of other names before his true name which is similar to a problem we have in software deployment. How do you get the true identify of software? Well, ISO/IEC 19770-2 wants to be the solution and today's release of the WiX toolset makes supporting that standard trivial.

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?

My interview with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell at .NET Rocks went up yesterday. Like all interviews or public speaking gigs, I had some butterflies before the show. But when Carl Skype'd me the world just floated away and I on! The whole interview was tons of fun but there were a couple things that I thought went particularly well.

Since the beginning, or at least as long as I can remember, WiX toolset builds were released on Fridays. Friday seemed like as good a day as any. It was at the end of the week, so it would have whatever contributions were made that week. Plus everyone looks forward to Fridays. Well, starting this week we're moving the build to Monday.