Release Candidate defined.
A week+ ago, I posted a blog entry noting that the WiX toolset was out of beta not in it. I also mentioned that we are now in the "release candidate" mode and provided a quick definition to differentiate it from "beta" mode. A few days later Steven Sinofsky posted a entire blog entry about Windows 7 entering the Release Candidate milestone. In typical Sinofsky-style, Steven posted a much longer definition of release candidate and placed it in context with the other typical milestones at Microsoft.
Now I’m still a little flexible with some of the bugs we’ll take into the WiX toolset even though we are in release candidate mode. For example, as I mentioned in comments previously we took the MSI 5.0 changes late in WiX v3 for three reasons:
- Staying current with the Windows Installer is important for the WiX toolset.
- Implementing the Windows Installer beta functionality helps them find bugs.
- The next official release of the WiX toolset (after v3) will be available quite a while after Windows 7 ships, the MSI 5.0 functionality may be required by our customers before then.
We also still have some work to integrate Votive with the next version of Visual Studio. That work will be coming in late since we’re waiting for their beta.
Anyway, I hope that provides some more detail about how we’re approaching the end game for WiX v3. Getting the bug found and count down to zero is our primary focus. That and having a little fun along the way.