WiX Online Meeting #77 Highlights

Issue triage

• Bug 4836 | “‘darice.cub’ cannot be found” error pops up randomly was a bug we reopened last meeting with a comment requesting logs. We reiterated our request as so far nobody on the call has seen this happen in person.

• Bug 4847 | Install button for installing Wix stays invisible came back with a pull request from @jchoover. It’s a small XAML-only change to the WiX BA but does change the UI so we decided to take it in WiX v3.11.

• Bug 4853 | heat.exe : error HEAT0001 : Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. was researched by @rseanhall and turns out to be due to a missing version of MSBuild. Sean provided a pull request to provide more explicit error messages. After the meeting, I merged the pull request and closed the bug.

• Bug 4854 | WixBA fails to retry after Cancel. was discovered by Jacob while fixing bug 4847 and as he also provided a pull request, we decided to take this in WiX v3.10.

• Feature 4855 | Light should not show ICE informational messages reports that the generally-useless informational messages from validation shouldn’t be shown during “normal” verbose linking. General agreement abounded, so we opened the issue for WiX v3.x to show informational messages only when the -pedantic switch is specified.

• Feature 4856 | Print EULA functionality in wixstdba is a request to be able to print the EULA shown in some WixStdBA themes. Rather than add printing code to WixStdBA, we opened another feature request to support opening the EULA in the user’s default RTF editor, which lets us support both printing and saving with only a couple lines of code.

• Bug 4857 | DTF Bug with new Windows 10 Modern ARP was today’s unpleasantly scary bug. Though generally Windows 10 hasn’t required specific work for WiX v3.10, there is apparently a bug in how Windows launches uninstalls from the system settings app. On both x86 and x64 systems, managed-code immediate custom actions built with DTF fail. Uninstalling from the desktop control panel, via command line, or via right-click on the .msi all succeed. After a fair bit of discussion, we decided that because multiple versions of DTF suffer from this issue, holding the release of WiX v3.10 would not provide immediate relief. If we discover the root cause and can work around it, we could consider shipping another “R2” release (as we did for WiX v3.9) to get it out before WiX v3.11.

• Feature 4858 | Add UninstallMsiPackage/@ProductCode to let Burn uninstall packages is a feature request opened by your humble editor to explicitly author a way to uninstall a package during execution of a bundle. The goal is to be able to uninstall a package before installing its replacement, which is one way of working around MSI’s lack of support for upgrading between per-user and per-machine packages. It’s open in WiX v3.x and tagged as requiring a WIP.

• Feature 4859 | Ship the WiX Toolset private key is the second feature request opened this week by your humble editor. Given the changes in guidance offered by the .NET team, I suggested we adapt that guidance. It turns out I was rather lonely in supporting the change but such is the danger of being a trendsetter. We decided to suspend this issue…for now.

• Bug 4860 | thmviewer doesn’t work properly when it can’t find an image points out that ThmViewer doesn’t support viewing themes that are missing resources (like embedded or external image files). Supporting an optional best-effort attempt to load a theme would go a long way toward making ThmViewer more useful during theme development. We opened the issue for WiX v3.x.

• Bug 4862 | Hidden persisted variables are written to the state file in plaintext reports that hidden bundle variables—usually hidden because they contain sensitive information—are persisted in plaintext. We agreed hidden variables could be persisted in encrypted form using DPAPI and that this would be a safe change for WiX v3.x.

• Bug 4863 | WixStdBA doesn’t format the variable’s value in editbox shows that associating a variable with an edit box in a WixStdBA theme uses the variable’s unformatted value, so providing a default like [ComputerName] doesn’t work. We decided this is something we could offer in WiX v4 if we also support variables with literal content.

WiX v3.10

After the post-meeting pull requests were accepted, we’re left with one new (old) bug for WiX v3.10: Bug 4630 | Several pre-initialized built-in variables do not resolve when used in MsiProperty values. @rseanhall opened a pull request to fix a remaining issue with this bug. We discussed a couple of issues with the fix and have a direction to go. We decided this was serious enough to pull into WiX v3.10.

The plan is to have another release candidate shortly and to ship RTM within a few weeks. Plans, of course, rarely survive contact with the enemy, so we’ll keep watch.