Rob Mensching's Blog - page 18

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.

Today, Thanksgiving Day, we are declaring the WiX v3.5 in escrow. If you follow my twitter account, you saw this tweet yesterday. The WiX v3.5.2325.0 release is the first v3.5 build with zero open bugs. That pretty much defines done! So, what is next for v3.5?

I posted this email to wix-users a while ago but the question keeps coming up: "Is it safe to use WiX v3.5?" The next question is always: "What about v3.6?" Interestingly, my answers about picking v3.5 and v3.6 (the WiX builds under development) are very different than my answers were for for WiX v3.0 and WiX v2.0 (when they were under development).

This morning we released WiX v3.5.2229.0 as the Release Candidate for WiX v3.5!

Most of you aren't my friend on Facebook. That's okay, you're not missing anything. In fact, my Facebook profile was completely dead until Twitter created the Facebook app that republished my tweets. Until yesterday, I basically added no additional content to Facebook than what I posted to Twitter. What changed yesterday?

After five months of heads down coding on Burn in WiX v3.6, it is past time for me to take a deep breath and look around. A quick glance tells me that we are doing okay but we are late. The core contributors of the WiX Toolset are working hard but we are fragmented so progress is slow. Let's look at where we are at with WiX v3.5 and WiX v3.6 in detail.

A good question about Burn was raised in the comments on my blog entry about Burn yesterday. The tiny executable that downloads the bulk of the installation content is great when you want to install on your computer. However, if you need to distribute the installation to many machines, like most corporations do, downloading from the Internet is more expensive than downloading from a corporate server. Fortunately, we have a solution for this scenario.