Today's meeting represented a huge mental shift: Instead of meeting Tuesdays, today's meeting took place on a Thursday. We haven't met on Thursdays since WiX Online Meeting #53 back in January 2015. Thursdays are also the traditional meeting day for Back In The Day(tm) when WiX meetings were physical things, at Rob's house or a random conference room on Microsoft's Redmond campus.
Issue triage
WiX v4 should automatically set msidbFileAttributesChecksum for PE files, from @barnson, came back this week after I did the research I promised I'd do a meeting (or two) ago. Checksums in PE files are still a thing and as MSI suggests their use, we agreed to take this issue in WiX v4.0.
Document WIX_IS_NETFRAMEWORK_XXX_OR_LATER_INSTALLED id, from @barnson, suggests that we should document the id of the custom action that sets the various
WIX_IS_NETFRAMEWORK_XXX_OR_LATER_INSTALLEDproperties, to properly schedule custom actions that rely on the values being set. We agreed and I volunteered to write the documentation.Wix installer hangs inside Windows container, from @IvanBoyko, turns out to be a more generic bug in the WiX BA: If .NET 3.5.1 isn't detected during a
/passiveor/silentinstallation, the WiX BA hangs. As I've had terribly luck making changes to WixBA, Rob convinced Jacob to take a look at properly quitting the BA for this case.Documentation out of date about including the Visual C++ redistributable in an installer, from @bergmeister, points out that merge modules are no longer supported for the Universal CRT portion of the Visual C++ runtime. As the documentation refers to the Visual C++ runtime merge modules, we're pointing users in a wrong direction. We took this issue in WiX v4.x to clarify.
WixTasks GenerateCompileWithObjectPath fails with FIPS-compliant error on FIPS-enabled machine, from @ljboiler, is about the somewhat esoteric feature that Candle.exe provides of giving output files unique names when there are multiple source files with the same name. To make the names unique, Candle.exe generates a hash using the MD5 algorithm, which is not available when a machine is set via policy to FIPS-compliant mode. Though WiX's use of MD5 has nothing to do with security, we took this issue in WiX v4.0 and Rob volunteered to switch hash algorithms.
Heat-ing an ActiveX control, from @JonathanRowell, complains of insufficient self-registration harvesting from Heat.exe for an ActiveX control. After reminding myself what an ActiveX control was, we took the issue in WiX v4.x if someone can dig into what Heat.exe missed.
WiX v4.0 status
Rob spoke at length about the big changes happening in WiX v4.0 around repository reorganization, .NET Core, and the move to a pipeline model for compiling, linking, and binding. Take a look at the video for Rob's discussion and stay tuned for more details and opportunities for more people to get involved in some of the exciting changes coming in WiX v4.0.