As part of the PDC 2008 festivities, the Visual Studio team has released a CTP of Visual Studio 2010. As predicted, the CTP includes a “productization” of WiX, including the core toolset, Votive, and many of the WiX extensions.
Many? Not all? Right; the CTP includes the following extensions:
- WixIIsExtension
- WixNetFxExtension
- WixSqlExtension
- WixUIExtension
- WixUtilExtension
- WixVSExtension
That means, at least in this CTP, the following extensions aren’t included:
- WixComPlusExtension
- WixDifxAppExtension
- WixDirectXExtension
- WixFirewallExtension
- WixGamingExtension
- WixIsolatedAppExtension
- WixMsmqExtension
- WixOfficeExtension
- WixPSExtension
We hope at least some of them will make a reappearance by the time beta rolls around.
The version of WiX included is 3.0.4325 from last month.
Check it out yourself: Download the ~7GB Virtual PC image, make note of the passwords shown on the download page, run the self-extractor to extract the ~24GB(!) .vhd, and load it in your favorite virtualization software. Take a look at the C:\Program Files\Visual Studio 2010 Windows Installer XML Toolkit CTP directory.
The Visual Studio folks working on shipping WiX hang out in their own CTP forum. Check out Candy’s intro thread.