Now that there’s a spot for weekly builds again, the hiatus that began with the release of WiX v3.6 beta in October is done. WiX v3.6.2520.0 is available and contains almost three months of features and fixes. One of the nicest new features is a much-improved bootstrapper application for the WiX bundle installer.

Take a look, install, try it out, and report bugs!

There are three primary buckets applications fall into in the brave new Windows 8 world:

1. Metro-style
2. Windows 8 non-Metro-style
3. “Retro-style” (aka legacy, anything created before 2011)

Metro-style apps get all the goodies Windows 8 offers, including AppX packaging I’ll blog about. As Rob describes, deployment is a first-class citizen in Windows 8. Apps in the other two buckets have the exact same options they have in Windows 7. And by exact, I mean “really, almost exactly 100 percent.”

No soup for you

As is its wont, rather than fixing the weaknesses of its existing platform, Microsoft replaced it with an all-new platform with a different set of weaknesses. Naturally, Windows 8 still includes Windows Installer. But if you were hoping for some of the same deployment love for your non-Metro-style apps that the Windows team showered on Metro-style apps, I’m sorry to disappoint: For better or worse, Windows 8′s MSI is functionally identical to Windows 7′s MSI v5.0.

A quick spelunking in the Windows 8 SDK available to MSDN subscribers reveals mostly structual changes to the MSI header files. For example, the _WIN32_MSI macro is defined as “500″ for both Windows 7 and Windows 8:

#if (_WIN32_WINNT >= 0x0601 || (defined(NTDDI_VERSION) && NTDDI_VERSION >= NTDDI_WIN8))
 #define _WIN32_MSI   500
#elif (_WIN32_WINNT >= 0x0601 || (defined(NTDDI_VERSION) && NTDDI_VERSION >= NTDDI_WIN7))
 #define _WIN32_MSI   500

The only addition is a new MSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS value in Msi.h:

typedef enum tagMSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS
{
 MSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS_X86   = 0x00000001L, // set if creating the script for i386 platform
 MSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS_IA64  = 0x00000002L, // set if creating the script for IA64 platform
 MSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS_AMD64 = 0x00000004L, // set if creating the script for AMD64 platform
 MSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS_ARM   = 0x00000008L //set if creating the script for ARM platform
}MSIARCHITECTUREFLAGS;

and a new property name in MsiDefs.h:

#define IPROPNAME_ARM              TEXT("Arm")

As we’ve known for a while that Windows 8 will support the ARM architecture, its presence isn’t too surprising.

There are no other new enumeration values. There are no new MSI API functions. While it’s possible there are, for example, new standard actions that wouldn’t have visible impact in the header files, I don’t find it too likely.

That yields two tiny bits of good news:

1. Lack of visible interface changes probably means a lack of visible behavior changes. That likely means that your Retro-style installers will probably work without change, or at least as well as the classic Windows 8 desktop supports Retro-style apps.
2. WiX and Burn won’t need to do anything to support Windows 8. OK, that’s something only a few of us need to worry about…

Coming up: More about Metro-style deployment.

Media templates

There are advantages to having multiple cabinets for your MSI packages, from build-time performance to more reliable downloading. Unfortunately, up to WiX v3.5, WiX required you to explicitly identify a set of files to go into a second (or third or fourth or…) cabinet using the DiskId attribute on the Component, File, Directory, or DirectoryRef elements.

WiX v3.6′s MediaTemplate element automatically creates cabinets up to an optionally-specified size. Files are assigned to “fill” each cabinet.

Note: MediaTemplate replaces the Media element; having both in your authoring results in a link-time error. You can still manually author DiskId attributes but they’re ignored in favor of MediaTemplate’s automatic cabinet making.

The simplest use of MediaTemplate is an empty element that takes all the defaults:

<MediaTemplate />

MediaTemplate will generate as many cabinets as necessary for all the files in your package, up to a maximum of 999 cabinets. (If you have more than that, good luck!) Each cabinet will:

• Be named Prod###.cab
• Be external to the package (not embedded)
• Store up to 200MB of files before compression

MediaTemplate shares some of Media’s attributes, to cover the same functionality:

• CompressionLevel specifies the compression level to use in each cabinet.
• DiskPrompt specifies the disk name and VolumeLabel the volume label, if you’re dealing with multi-disk installs.
• EmbedCab lets you embed the cabinets in the .msi package. The default is to keep the cabinets external.

Attributes specific to MediaTemplate control how the cabinets are generated and filled:

• CabinetTemplate names each cabinet. The default is “Prod{0}.cab” which yields cabinet names of Prod1.cab, Prod2.cab, and so forth. The “{0}” is replaced with cabinet numbers, from 1 to 999. MSI says that cabinets have to follow the rules for 8.3 short filenames, so you can have up to five whole characters to distinguish your cabinet names.
• MaximumUncompressedMediaSize, as its impressively-long name indicates, specifies the maximum size of the files in each cabinet, in megabytes. The default size is 200MB.MediaTemplate counts actual file sizes—without compression—as it adds files to cabinets. Doing so is more predictable than trying to add files to cabinets as part of the cabinet-creation process; WiX can’t accurately predict how much a particular file will take up once it’s compressed so adding a file to a cabinet might make it larger than the maximum size. Using the uncompressed file size means that compressed cabinets will generally be smaller than the maximum size. On the flip side, any individual files that are larger than the maximum size go into a single-file cabinet, so it’s possible that such cabinets will be larger than the maximum size.

You can override MaximumUncompressedMediaSize by specifying the size in megabytes in the WIX_MUMS environment variable. You wouldn’t typically do so but using an environment variable makes it easy to tweak the cabinet size on a developer box, say to create more, smaller cabinets to take advantage of WiX’s multithreaded cabinet creation to speed up builds on a developer box with many cores.

Overriding compression level

Speaking of speeding up developer builds…Back in 2008, I added the default compression level feature to let you specify compression level at the project level instead of just in WiX authoring. That feature let you change compression level without changing authoring but you still had to change your .wixproj or other build script.

Now in WiX v3.6, you can override the compression level by specifying the WIX_COMPRESSION_LEVEL environment variable with the same values you can specify in, for example, the MediaTemplate/@CompressionLevel attribute. WIX_COMPRESSION_LEVEL overrides the default compression level specified in .wixproj MSBuild projects and explicitly authored @CompressionLevel attribute values.

There’s one simple use case: WIX_COMPRESSION_LEVEL lets developers specify “none” or “low” compression to avoid pegging all their CPU cores doing “mszip” or “high” compression that they absolutely don’t care about.

On to v3.6!

Thanks to Rob’s work on wixcontrib, the code to handling directory nuking was available. I took it with some improvements into WixUtilExtension in WiX v3.6 and it’s available with today’s build: 3.6.1321.0.

Use the RemoveFolderEx element as a child of a Component:

<Component …>
<util:RemoveFolderEx On=”uninstall” Property=”MyDirtyDirectory” />
</Component>

There is one annoying restriction: RemoveFolderEx cannot be used directly on a directory defined in your installer. It’s an annoying chicken/egg problem. As adding directories and files to be deleted affects MSI’s file costing, RemoveFolderEx has to do its thing before costing. Unfortunately, MSI doesn’t set up properties for target directories until after costing is complete.

According to a poll both unscientific and informal, the most common use case is that the directory path is already written to a registry value anyway, for use by the installed application. See Rob’s blog post The WiX toolset’s “Remember Property” pattern for an example. As the AppSearch standard action sets the property well before costing begins, RemoveFolderEx works.

Quick implementation note: RemoveFolderEx works by recursing from the specified directory, adding temporary rows to the RemoveFile table for each subdirectory, one for the directory and one for the files in each directory. This is the pattern I described as “semi-custom actions” way back in 2007.

• RobMen: SFBUG:3139522 – add MakeSfxCA.exe.config to binaries.zip file.
• BobArnso: SFFeature:3130590 – Update DifxApp DLLs in DifxApp .wixlibs to version shipped in DDK 7600.16385.1.
• EricStJ: SFBUG:3147256 Votive 2005/2008 corrupts binary files in templates

Download, install, and let us know how if it’s ready to ship!

Personally, I hope v3.5.2325.0 is the final release: 2325 is the number of one of the vital RFCs that make the Internet work.

Now’s the time to download it, install it, and let us know if WiX v3.5 is ready to ship.

See Rob’s announcement: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2010/10/29/Trick-or-treat-WiX-v3.5-Release-Candidate

Get it here: http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.5.2229.0/

The Windows Installer XML variable ‘WixUICostingPopupOptOut’ is declared in more than one location.  Please remove one of the declarations.

You can opt back in to the disk-costing dialog box by providing a value of 0:

<WixVariable Id=”WixUICostingPopupOptOut” Value=”0″ />

Look for this change in next Friday’s builds of WiX v3.5 and v3.6. (Any build more recent than yesterday’s v3.5.2208.0 and v3.6.1008.0 will have it.)