Day six under winter weather watches, warnings, and advisories. Temperatures hover in single digits (°F) and wind chills fall below zero (°F). Reaching toward the back of the pantry for crumbs. On the upside: Plenty of time to work on WiX v5 features because who wants to go outside?!
WiX v5 release plan
During our last meeting, we slightly reset our WiX v5 plan. During the meeting, we'd kept the dates to the last Monday of each month but after the meeting stopped recording (and as I reported during that meeting's highlights), we moved the dates out a day so the releases would occur on Tuesdays. Coincidentally, we have scheduled meetings those days but I, for one, am grateful we don't have to run around quite so much on a Monday.
The WiX v5 release dates are:
- v5.0.0-rc.1 on 30-Jan-2024
- v5.0.0-rc.2 on 27-Feb-2024
- v5.0.0-rc.3 on 26-Mar-2024
- v5.0.0 on 5-Apr-2024
Now that we're two weeks out, we took another quick pass through the issues assigned to the v5.0.0-rc.1 milestone. We decided to defer a few, given that whole two weeks out thing and acknowledged that even those we haven't deferred yet doesn't mean we're forcing ourselves to squeeze them in. No death marches here, please and thank you.
Issue triage
Component identifier does not defaults to the identifier of the resource that is the explicit keypath of the component, from @danielh1989, points out that when you don't specify the
Idattribute of a component, when WiX defaults to the id of the key path (like a file), it doesn't make the component id public. WiX v4 makes it private and therefore visible only within the fragment where it's defined. We decided it made sense to bring along the key path id's access modifier when we give the component id its default. I volunteered to get that done for WiX v5-rc.1 (or at least try).The CoreCompile step using wix.exe does not include in parameters the .wxs files generated by heat.exe, from @0xAndre, is a result of manually invoking Heat and not doing the MSBuild magic that the Heat targets do to wire up the generated WiX source files into the build. If you're going to use Heat, stick with the
HarvestDirectoryitem group approach -- or look for WiX v5 with its built-in file harvesting, coming soon!Page Not Found: /documentation/manual/v3/bundle/wixstdba/wixstdba_customize.html, from @bebedgreat, points out a broken link that needs a redirect to keep the whole Web flowing smoothly. I take that responsibility seriously, so I volunteered to make the fix.