Rob Mensching's Blog - page 17

I joined the Developer Division almost 2 years ago. When I announced the move I spoke about my new focus on the short and long term of setup on Windows. In the Windows 8 keynote and the Developer Preview bits available now you can see the results of both. It all starts in the keynote when Antoine Leblond comes on stage and fires up Visual Studio.

It's been nine months since the last "State of the WiX toolset" blog post and six months since the WiX v3.5 release. Unlike last year we find ourselves focused on a single front, WiX v3.6. Let's take a moment and evaluate where we are and where we are going.

The Visual Studio setup is composed of over 30,000 source files that get compiled into over 250 MSI files. Needless to say it is a large code base. The problem is that a lot of the code was machine generated and is now very difficult to maintain. A few months ago, I started a large scale restructuring effort to improve the code and build process. I thought I'd share one of the key aspects in my restructuring effort.

Today is my birthday. I use these blog posts like open time capsules. They capture a moment in time at a specific time. Up to this point, birthday's always felt like they were building up to some greater event. This year I feel like my birthday finds me in the middle of execution. That is glorious and frustrating.

In the last few weeks, SourceForge apparently was attacked and they feared the passwords of all users were divulged. To protect everyone, SourceForge required all accounts to re-activate via a link sent through email or answering a secret question. This caught us off guard because we forgot the email address of the SF account used to manage the WiX SourceForge web site and releases page and there was no secret question. The result, WiX v3.6 builds are not being 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.

WiX v3.5 escrow has been a bit bumpier than I would have liked. We started with the Thanksgiving Day build. Then we had the end of December build that seemed for sure to be the last one. In the end, we did one more build today. The changes were small so we're only going to sit on this build for a week or so. We're really down to the wire. You know what to do, right?

There is a property in Add/Remove Programs (called "Programs and Features" in Vista+ but setup developers in the know call it "ARP") that can specify the install location for your application. Like most properties in ARP, it's questionable what value InstallLocation provides. However, it's there and some things look for it and the Windows Installer provides a standard way to set it, so let's talk about how to do so with the WiX Toolset.