But please don’t, unless you’re champing at the bit to help us work on the Burn chainer or Votive. This week’s release is focused on getting the v3.5 tree building using the beta release of Visual Studio 2010 and other infrastructure pieces involved in building and publishing a new branch of the WiX toolset. As such, it’s a developer’s release and isn’t ready for general use.

That said, as promised, here’s what you can look forward to in the very near future:

• Burn, the new WiX multi-package chainer platform.
• Votive integratation for Visual Studio 2010.
• Extension support for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.

WiX v3.0 is in release-candidate phase, approaching release: There are zero v3.0 bugs open. See Rob’s empty chart. Only critical bugs breaking core use cases would be considered for WiX v3.0 now.

So I guess WiX West team in Redmond has been relaxing as WiX v3.0 winds down…oh wait, I guess we have been cooking up a little something…

WiX v3.0 is in release-candidate phase, approaching release: There are only 6 v3.0 bugs still open. See Rob’s bug breakdown.

WiX v3.0 is in release-candidate phase, approaching release: There are only 7 v3.0 bugs still open. See Rob’s bug breakdown.

WiX v3.0 is in release-candidate phase, approaching release: There are only 6 v3.0 bugs still open. See Rob’s bug breakdown.

You might already be using Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based, take-no-prisoners/competitors server virtualization technology. Personally, I prefer using a client OS, especially when working with technologies like WPF. I also prefer client virtualization products because they tend to have convenience features like drag-n-drop of files from the host machine to the virtual machine. Server virtualization products tend to lose convenience features because they’re meant to be run from headless servers locked away in an air-conditioned server room.

However, convenience aside, for developers, the new-and-improved-with-Windows-prefix Virtual PC has its share of good, bad, and ugly.

Good (maybe even great)

New features are almost always good, especially when other products have them (or maybe especially when they don’t).

• Virtual PC now supports USB. That means you can attach USB devices to a virtual machine. The most common I’ve heard requested are smart cards and media players. (Hyper-V doesn’t support USB.)
• Virtual PC now uses multiple threads. That means multiple VMs will use multiple cores instead of round-robining on a single core.
• Virtual PC can now be automated. That means it’s now feasible to build tools on top of Virtual PC, which didn’t have an automation interface in the past. Unfortunately, it’s a COM API so it’s not the perfect managed-code interface, but it’ll do.

Bad (or at least disappointing)

Existing limitations that weren’t lifted when you really hoped they would be: yeah, generally considered “bad.”

• Virtual machines are limited to one virtual processor. Hyper-V supports multiple virtual CPUs per virtual machine. Anyone expecting the next version of Microsoft’s desktop virtualization technology to also support multiple virtual CPUs is probably disappointed.
• 64-bit virtual machines aren’t supported: Hyper-V supports running 64-bit OSes in VMs. Virtual PC: not so much. Given that Windows Server 2008 R2 is Microsoft’s first server OS that comes only in 64-bit flavors, the windows for 32-bit-only virtualization is closing fast, so this limitation is definitely disappointing.

Ugly (but probably unimportant)

Luckily, “ugly” here is limited and provisional. It won’t even matter to most people.

Virtual PC now requires hardware-assisted virtualization. Previous versions of Virtual PC took advantage of Intel VT and AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization if it was available. Now it’s required. As a practical matter, most x86/x64 CPUs shipped for the past two or three years support hardware-assisted virtualization. However, Intel has frequently made available varieties of its CPU lines and one of the differentiators has been VT support. For example, when the first Intel quad-core CPUs shipped, they all had VT; now:

• 11 of 17 Core 2 Quad desktop CPUs have it
• 22 of 36 Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs have it
• 86 of 109 Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs have it

Contrast with the latest-and-greatest:

• 2 of 2 Core i7 CPUs have it

and the server/workstation line of Xeon CPUs:

• 172 of 174 dual-core and quad-core Xeon CPUs have it (not counting the ancient Xeons Intel still lists)

Suggestion: Always check with Intel’s Processor Spec Finder Web site to make sure that the CPU in the machine you’re considering supports VT. Use Intel’s Processor Identification Utility to check for the VT feature. If you’re buying configurable hardware, check the available upgrades: You might be able to get a CPU with VT as a cheap upgrade. And if you already have a CPU without VT, well, a new machine could both get you hardware-assisted virtualization and help stimulate the economy.

What have you done for me lately?

For developers and testers, Windows Virtual PC is a nice upgrade. Automation and multiple threads are big wins for testing. But the lack of 64-bit VM support is a major drawback with the soon-to-be-current version of Windows Server 2008 R2 being available only in 64-bit versions. Even for teams doing nothing but client-OS development, testing products on x64 OSes is vital.

Clearly, however, this version of Virtual PC was focused on providing Windows XP Mode. I’ll hold on to hope that, flush with that success, management will encourage the Virtual PC team (with the carrot-and-stick-but-mostly-stick approach) to give developers and testers more virtualization love.

WiX v3.0 is in release-candidate phase, approaching release: There are only 8 v3.0 bugs still open. See Rob’s bug breakdown.

There are 11 v3.0 bugs still open. See Rob’s bug breakdown.

There are 10 v3.0 bugs still open. See Rob’s bug breakdown.

Announcement

WiX v3.0.5217.0 is the WiX v3.0 RC2 build. We encourage all users to upgrade to this build for the latest fixes and to help verify that WiX v3.0 is ready for release.

Changes

The following changes are since my last WiX Highlights entry for WiX v3.0.5120.0. There have been several WiX releases since then but this is my first relatively calm weekend since relocating to Cambridge to write them up.