Rob Mensching's Blog - page 36

A while ago, I saw this blog post about creating an uninstall shortcut using the WiX toolset. My first reaction was, "Uhh, I thought the Logo says you're not supposed to create uninstall shortcuts." But as the blog author noted clients are clients (especially if they are paying the bills). My second reaction to the blog entry was, "Jeez, those CustomActions don't seem like they should be necessary."

The last couple days have been just draining. Actually, the last few weeks have been draining. Lots of communicating but not lots of action. Lack of action means lack of progress. Lack of progress despite lots of energy expenditure means draining.

I love William Gibson's novels. I was introduced to cyberpunk when I was in high school and being the geek I am I just sucked it all in.

I was recently pinged by a triumvirate of individuals asking me about using managed code to write CustomActions. This is a hot topic that comes up about every other month on the wix-users mailing list at SourceForge. Those of you that hang out on that mailing list know that I've repeatedly stated that the WiX toolset does not support managed code CustomActions because the Windows Installer team does not support managed code CustomActions.

Writing down the roadmap for the WiX toolset has been on my todo list for a very long time. Those who hang around me already know the roadmap but I always knew I needed to write it down to reach the world wide audience. With the final days of WiX v2 upon us, now is a great time to look at where we are going with the WiX v3 toolset.

Last Thursday we (quietly) celebrated the 3rd anniversary of the WiX toolset. Throughout the night I was pounding on the last two WiX v2 bugs assigned to me. The fixes will show up this week's build (Friday morning). That leaves us with only one open v2 bug which has to do with some bizarre behavior of tallow on Vista.

Tonight is a momentous night for the volunteers who work on the WiX toolset. It was three years ago today that we released the WiX toolset to the world.

About 3 months ago, I noted that I was focused on the drive to a WiX v2 toolset final release.