The WiX team has a penchant for shipping important releases on holidays. Today's saint's feast day celebrates the release of WiX v4 RC4 and HeatWave v0.9.6. Then, as announced at our most recent WiX Online Meeting, the planned date for the release of WiX v4 is 5-April, the 19th anniversary of the first time WiX shipped on SourceForge back in 2004.
HeatWave v0.9.6 supports WiX v4 RC4 and includes a number of bug fixes that users have reported.
To upgrade WiX from RC3 to RC4, check out the WiX release notes.
To update HeatWave Community Edition from within Visual Studio:
- Choose Extensions|Manage Extensions.
- Expand the Updates node.
- Select Visual Studio Marketplace.
- Select HeatWave.
- Choose Update (or Update All).
- Choose Close.
- Close Visual Studio to trigger the update.
To install HeatWave Community Edition for the first time:
Double-click the downloaded .vsix file to install HeatWave.
Now's the time
If you haven't checked out WiX v4 prereleases yet, now's the time to take a look at Release Candidate 4. Here's the scoop on WiX v4 and HeatWave:
WiX v4 is a major release of the WiX Toolset and contains some exciting new features like broad Arm64 support and a modern acquisition experience. You can read the release notes for an overview of what's new and changed.
HeatWave supports the WiX v4 acquisition experience with support for SDK-style projects and package references that acquire the WiX tooling from NuGet without needing to install anything. HeatWave also supports:
- Conversion of WiX v3 projects and authoring
- Building of WiX v4 SDK-style projects
- Project references and WiX extension package references
- Project and item templates
- Property pages to control how the project builds
HeatWave Community Edition is available free of charge. Read more about it and download it here.
To hear about the ongoing work FireGiant is doing in HeatWave, follow us here on the FireGiant blog.
If you'd like expert help upgrading to WiX v4, check out our conversion offer.