Tag Archives: WiX highlights

WiX v3.5 supports Visual Studio 2010 beta 2

So that the WiX Working Group can enjoy Hallowe’en on Saturday, WiX v3.5.1030.0 with support for Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 was released today. You can get the bits at http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.5.1030.0/. This isn’t a full beta release – Burn is still in active development and isn’t ready for prime-time use yet – but we want to support everyone using the beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010, which shipped last week.

Candy, Visual Studio program manager and WiX Working Group babysitter/cat-herder, had this to say about the features in this release:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta shipped on 10/21. With the team’s hard work and agility, we were able to release the WiX support on VS2010 Beta 2 today! Here are some highlights for this release:

  • Extension Manager Integration – Now you can download and install WiX directly from within the VS IDE by launching Extension Manager
  • Major performance improvement during project building – No more IDE freezing during build
  • Automatic upgrade from VS2008 to VS2010 – no more manual editing of wixproj files to change the tools version
  • Improved IDE experience including drag/drop of nodes, copy/paste of items, and project references
  • Added Visual Studio 2010 Express products detection in the WiX VS Extension – New in Beta
  • Over 40 + bug fixes

I’m pleased we were able to get a release supporting beta 2 out so quickly and I’m very excited about the “no more IDE freezing during build” improvement. There are several other smaller enhancements that will make WiX v3.5 a no-brainer upgrade when it ships next year.

In the meantime, if you’re using Visual Studio 2010, please grab this build and be on the lookout for future weekly releases. Problems, questions? Send mail to wix-users, file bug reports, or submit feature requests.

Highlights of WiX v3.5.0529.0

WiX v3.5.0529.0 was released on Friday, 29-May-2009. You can download it from http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.5.0529.0/.

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.

Highlights of WiX v3.0.5329.0

WiX v3.0.5329.0 was released on Friday, 29-May-2009. You can download it from http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.0.5329.0/.

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.

Developer ID Description
Aaron   Updated error message that’s displayed when there’s a mismatch between a database’s codepage and characters used in the database. Oh, if only there were a way of representing all those characters…Alas, until then, MSI databases require codepages and that means that you have to use the right subset of characters for the codepage you’re using.
Aaron   Added a topic on integrating WiX into a Team Foundation Build lab project.
"Various artists"   Fixed typos in error messages, changed the logging output of a couple of MSBuild tasks to not look like error messages, added schema support for links inside element descriptions.
Aaron 2795343 GenerateBootstrapper ApplicationFile must be relative path

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…

Highlights of WiX v3.0.5322.0

WiX v3.0.5322.0 was released on Friday, 22-May-2009. You can download it from http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.0.5322.0/.

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

Developer ID Description
Aaron   Removed the block from the WiX installer that prevented installation when the Visual Studio distribution of WiX was installed. Now that the Visual Studio distribution of WiX is no more, is bereft of life, rests in peace, and is otherwise an ex-distribution, the block is no longer needed.
Me   Fixed "missing" pages in the online WiX v3.0 manual. They weren’t missing, just using inconsistent case, which matters on SourceForge’s servers.
Eric 2777114 Problem with wixproj msbuild macro values
Me 2786736 Wix uses wrong msbuild version for .vcproj references
Eric 2792176 ConvertToAbsolutePath task not found VS2005
Me 2792525 Missing punctuation in WixUI_en-us.wxs

Highlights of WiX v3.0.5315.0

WiX v3.0.5315.0 was released on Friday, 15-May-2009. You can download it from http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.0.5315.0/.

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

Developer ID Description
Me   Based on a wix-users report, I added debug output logging to the WixUIValidatePath custom action (normal MSI logging doesn’t work because it’s a custom action triggered from a DoAction control event). I also added the WIXUI_DONTVALIDATEPATH property to suppress WixUIValidatePath calls.
Aaron   Added documentation annotations for deprecated elements in wix.xsd so information will appear in IntelliSense and not just the .chm.
Brian   Added the capability for heat to take an extension via the command line similar to how the other tools do using -ext Extension.
Me   Fixed user-reported typo in fr-FR localization.
Neil 2609695 Add support for harvesting performance counters
Eric 2790472 "error CNDL0288" using localized merge modules
Mike 2792009 XmlFile crashes in XPath mode when file doesn’t exist