Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
I posted the bulk of my reflections on the WiX Toolset's 20th Anniversary on the FireGiant blog. I just have a couple tidbits to include here.
As I noted on the FireGiant blog, twenty years is a long time in software years. It’s pretty crazy to think that I’ve worked on WiX longer for over half of my life and more than all the other projects combined. I mean, it’s 20 years Open Source but I the ideas behind WiX started in 1998 and I started coding in 1999. So, if you count fingers on keyboard, it’s been a 25 year project for me.
And there are still so many cool things to do, I can’t tell you when it’ll end. No time soon for sure.
Anyway, here’s a line that I really liked but didn’t quite make the cut for the blog:
In my twelve years at Microsoft I worked on Microsoft Office, Service Definition Initiative (aka: BIG), Windows Vista, Windows Marketplace, Live Mesh, and Visual Studio. Only half of those still exist.
It made me smile that both WiX and FireGiant have outlasted all but the biggest products that I worked on at Microsoft. Not bad. And I’m no Ray Ozzie.
Keep coding, you know I am (for another 25+ years, probably).