Remember on this, the Valentine's Day 2017 edition of the WiX Online Meeting, that "let's not do gifts this year" is a lie.
Issue triage
Trend Micro Antivirus blocks use of RunOnce, from @miracle152004, reports (yet another) instance of bullying network admins causing problems with some of Burn's internal behavior. We took this issue into WiX v4.0 to investigate ways of working around such restrictions.
Catastrophic failure from Torch utility, from @chadmiles, reports a problem building a transform with Torch. We're waiting for more information to determine if this is a problem in modern versions of WiX.
Building WiX projects that generate messages may deadlock in VSTS vNext builds, from @dwhearn, says that the new build system in Visual Studio Team Services can deadlock and time out when messages are emitted from a WiX build. We're waiting for more information to determine if this is a problem in WiX itself. In the meantime, running the build tools out of process works around the issue.
Dark doesn't know how to decompile MsiConfigureServices action, from @barnson, casually mentions that Dark.exe doesn't decompile the
MsiServiceConfigandMsiServiceConfigFailureActionstables (newly added in MSI 5.0). We took this issue into WiX v4.x for someone to implement.Support project harvesting in Heat with MSBuild 15, from @rseanhall, is a bug created by the way MSBuild now lives as part of Visual Studio 2017, which can be installed multiple times. That makes it troublesome-to-impossible to determine which MSBuild a user intended to run as part of harvesting. We took this issue into WiX v4.x to do the research and design to figure out how to specify which MSBuild should be used.
WiX v3.11 issue review
Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2017 would ship on 7-March. As of meeting #120, we had 24 open issues in the WiX v3.11 milestone. Those two facts didn't provide a lot of hope that we'd be able to ship WiX v3.11 close to VS2017. However, in an uncoordinated effort, Rob, Sean, Jacob, and I all plowed through a number of bugs and pull request reviews over the weekend. The result is that now we have only seven open issues.
Then, those fine, upstanding folks at FireGiant presented a proof of concept project to ship Votive, the WiX Toolset Visual Studio Extension, in the Visual Studio Marketplace. This avoids the problems of trying to install VSIX packages from an MSI package, complicated by the changes in Visual Studio 2017 to support multiple instances and to reduce registry use. The WIP outlines the approach.
Between excellent progress on open issues and a viable plan to ship Votive for Visual Studio 2017, our stake-in-the-ground plan is to ship a release candidate of both WiX v3.11 and Votive on 7-March when Visual Studio 2017 is released. And, in that fine WiX tradition of shipping releases on holidays, WiX v3.11 and Votive would ship on 1-April. We'll reevaluate those dates at meeting #122 on 28-Feburary.