Rob Mensching's Blog - page 33

As I noted about four weeks ago, WiX v3 is being moved to the .NET Framework 2.0. I originally hoped it would only take two or three nights of work to complete. Unfortunately, I was sick late last week and bailed out early so it took more like four nights of actual work. In any case, I think I finished the work tonight and just want to do a couple more test before I submit the code. Next week's release of the WiX toolset should now require the .NET Framework 2.0 as a minimum.

Tonight Jenny was breaking out the holiday decorations and wanted to listen to Christmas carols on the "radio". The "radio" in this case is an Hauppauge WinTV-PVR with FM tuner in the computer in our living room. Unfortunately, the radio quit working when I upgraded the machine from one of the Vista Ultimate release candidates to the final bits.

Today Visual Studio released the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" November 2007 CTP. "Rosario" builds on Visual Studio Team System 2008 to enhance the collaboration between developers and needs of the business, plus increasing application quality and testing support. Now that you've heard the standard marketing pitch, I'm sure you are wondering why I am pointing to a random preview of functionality from the Visual Studio team.

I've had a number of people ask me lately if there were any editors for the WiX toolset. This question surprised me because I thought the common WiX editors were easily found in one search query. Turns out neither query really covered the list of WiX editors that I often heard bandied about so I thought I'd write them down here.

A couple weeks ago I sent out a proposal to move the WiX v3 toolset to the .NET Framework 2.0. There wasn't much of a response but those that did were positive towards the proposal. I think most people just assumed that the WiX toolset required the .NET Framework 2.0 already. I also think that most developers have already adopted the 2.0 CLR so the dependency is no big deal. Finally, I also expect those developers still building on the .NET Framework 1.1 are probably using the WiX v2 toolset.

Some of you may be wondering why I went MIA for for about 8 weeks. Obviously, I got busy. There were two forces sucking up all my time over the last couple months.

Yesterday was Jenny and my first wedding anniversary. It was Sunday so no work was needing done. We had few plans for the day. Only thing on the schedule was to exchange "paper" gifts (which we did in the morning) and go to dinner back at the Edgewater (which we did in the early evening). We finished the evening dancing in our living room to our first dance and other selected favorites.

Derek made a guest appearance tonight at the weekly WiX toolset coding night. It was fun having him around again. We all caught up on the things that have happened in the last year or so. At the end of the night (about 1 AM), I dropped him off at his hotel downtown and drove back home.