Quick WiX Status.
A head cold is totally wiping me out right now but I wanted to post a few quick notes about progress on the WiX toolset.
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64-bit builds. If you watch the weekly releases then you’ve noticed that there hasn’t been a release in the last few weeks. The primary cause for the disruption is that Mike Carlson (a developer on the Visual Studio team) has been revamping our build system to build x86, x64 and ia64 builds of the WiX toolset. This ended up being a large undertaking because he needed to move the WiX toolset to the Visual Studio 2008 headers and libs.
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Visual Studio 2008. Since the 64-bit builds will need VS 2008 headers and libs, Peter Marcu is updating the solution files to build with VS 2008. The hope is that this will simplify some of the requirements to build the WiX toolset. Additionally, VS 2008 seems to simply perform better than VS 2005 so maybe we’ll get some development benefit there as well.
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FxCop compliance. Jason Ginchereau and Muhammad Ghaznawi (two more Visual Studio developers) have been plowing through the backlog of FxCop issues in all of the WiX toolset. Along the way they’ve also been moving a number of strings to resource files so that every part of the WiX toolset (not just the standard UI dialogs) will be able to be localized.
These efforts have resulted in sweeping changes across the whole code base. As a result, we’ve just held off on the builds for a bit while Mike stabilized his build system changes. I expect that when we all get together again next Thursday that the final issues will be worked out and builds will be back on a regular weekly schedule.
Thanks for the patience.