Welcome to the first WiX Online Meeting of 2024! If years follow the "Star Trek Even-Numbered Movies Are Good" rule, we can expect 2024 to be great, just like other even-numbered years like 2020...oh no.
WiX v5 plan
We'd originally thought to release a -preview.1 release of WiX v5 this coming Friday. Instead, we're going to slip the first release out a bit and turn it into a feature-complete -rc.1 release later this month. The new schedule looks like this:
- 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
This keeps us at monthly release candidate cadence without another month's delay before the WiX v5 official release.
We took a quick pass through the issues assigned to the soon-to-be-renamed v5.0.0-preview.1 milestone to decide which we were committing to, which we'd do if we had time, and which we were comfortable leaving for a future release.
Issue triage
Try/catch around WixValidator mutex, from @barnson, was my response to prevent a mysterious failure from revealing itself as a crash. The mysterious failure is still mysterious, but preventing a crash is always a good thing so I volunteered to do so in WiX v5.
After upgrading Wix v3.11 projects to v4.0.3 - I am not able to reference UI elements, from @vdrasutis, turns out to be a problem with a superfluous
TargetFrameworksproperty in the .wixproj that, due to WiX not being a managed .NET language, prevented the MSBuild/NuGet duo from properly restoring the UI extension NuGet package. The short fix is "don't do that." Rob contemplates a future where the WiX MSBuild targets were able to prevent or at least warn about this scenario.Accessibility: Screen Reader for "Destination Folder" is read in incorrect order, from @andyleejordan, if a slightly-better than average bug report for accessibility issues we tend to get in WiX. (But only slightly better -- I mean, reporting the WiX version as
Unsureis not exactly a high point.) But there was enough detail to understand the underlying problem, which is likely common in WixUI -- screen readers expose control ordering that aren't otherwise visible to controls like labels that aren't tab stops. So this issue goes into the WixUI accessibility bucket.Custom action projects not limited to targeting .NET Framework, from @nhiorns, requests the ability to create custom actions using .NET 6 or later (i.e., .NET that isn't .NET Framework). It's reasonable to desire modern .NET support, though I personally wouldn't be looking forward to 50MB custom action DLLs. The issue is
up for grabsfor interested parties.ShortFileName attribute of Directory element in .wix file doesn't allow to use a localization variable, from @MikeGratsas, reminded me that in 2024, MSI still requires 8.3 file and directory names and that at least one person in the world still manually authors at least one short directory name, instead of just letting WiX do it for us. Rob volunteered to allow the use of localization strings in WiX v5.