Rob Mensching's Blog - page 32

This is just a flippant thought so don't read to much into it but I found it amusing enough that I thought I'd share. Last week there was much discussion about Sun buying MySQL. While everyone was discussing what this meant for Sun and MySQL and the "Open Source Business Model", I was trying to figure out why this deal felt unusual yet familiar to me.

A few days ago I tried to post my second blog entry of the month. Windows Live Writer returned a very helpful error message from my server that told me I was out of disk space on the SQL Server. That was troubling because I don't have that many blog entries. It was late though and I didn't feel like debugging the server software so I called it a night.

If you watch the front page of the WiX toolset's web site and get notifications for changes to the Windows Installer XML News on SourceForge and subscribe to this blog then this is the third time you've seen this content. I apologize for the message in triplicate but there seem to be a surprising number of people that seem to believe that the WiX toolset has been abandoned because there has not been an update to the WiX SourceForge page in a while.

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.