Rob Mensching's Blog - page 22

Never before today had I considered adding support for emoticons to my blog engine but this blog post almost screams for it. You should read the title as "WiX v3.5 hearts VS2010 Beta 2". Yep, our friends in Visual Studio delivered fix after fix in Votive to ensure that the WiX Toolset now supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta2.

Almost exactly a year ago, on the anniversary where I declared November 4th a personal holiday, I said I felt like I was at the end of the beginning. Today I decided that I have definitely completed the beginning. On Monday, I start the middle.

Recently there were reports that the WiX Toolset was breaking unit test projects in Visual Studio 2008. This was surprised us because we thought unit test projects were working fine when we shipped. Well, it turns out this time the bug wasn't in the WiX toolset.

Music makes the coding go better and I've come to like the way the Zune software organizes and plays music. So when I was setting up the machine for RobMensching.com LLC (where I would undoubtedly be spending some hardcore coding time), I was disappointed to see that the Zune software refused to install on Windows 2008 R2.

I am officially launching RobMensching.com LLC today, Labor Day 2009. This new business will begin by offering software installation consulting services for the Windows Installer and WiX toolset. You can read more details about the business on my consulting page.

File this tidbit under documented but cryptic and missing an error message. I was recently creating 32-bit and 64-bit MSIs using the WiX toolset. The very helpful -arch command line switch to candle made it easy to build for both architectures with the same codebase. Maybe a little too easy.

In my previous blog post where I introduced some of the features of Burn the question whether Burn would work as a single self extracting executable was asked a few times. The answer is, "Of course!" but there is actually more to it than that.

It was almost ten years ago that I started a little project inside the firewalls of Microsoft called the WiX toolset. I called it a "Community Source" project because inside Microsoft the words "Open Source" only had negative connotations. I never would have guessed that 5 years later I would help reshape Microsoft's approach to Open Source by releasing my little project. Now 5 more years later, Microsoft takes another big step and contributes to the most famous Open Source project of all, Linux.