Rob Mensching's Blog - page 21

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.

If you follow me on Twitter (@robmen), you know I've become a huge Seattle Sounders FC fan. I haven't played soccer since I was a kid but after K invited Jenny and I to a match early this season we became hooked. Now we're season ticket holders (jumped in when they opened more seats mid-season) and follow away games regularly.

A long while ago, Bob wrote a short blog entry about the WiX toolset's upcoming bootstrapper adoringly named Burn. We made some early progress back then but refocused our energy on finishing WiX v3.0 which recently released. Now I'm back to Burn which will release with WiX v3.5.