WiX Online Meeting #75 Highlights

Public service announcements

1. Remember that the SourceForge mailing lists have been replaced with new mailing lists sponsored by FireGiant. Details and links to the new archives are available on the WiX Web site.

2. Rob has posted a “call for images” to adorn the wixtoolset.org Web site. Please take a look otherwise it’ll be up to Rob and me and Rob’s already rejected the cute cat pictures.

Issue triage

• Bug 4688 | MakeSfxCA.exe Could not find a part of the path was reopened with a suggested cause and its fix. We took it for v3.x.

• Bug 4737 | WIXUI_DONTVALIDATEPATH has no effect on BrowseDlg in WixUI_InstallDir was reopened with a fix, including a pull request. It’s a behavior change we can’t take for WiX v3.x, but we took it for WiX v4.0.

• Feature 4828 | Burn overwrites logs when retrying an MSI file is a new issue reporting that Burn overwrites logs when it retries installation of an MSI package. We took this as a feature request in WiX v3.x to append logs when retrying.

• Bug 4829 | VS2015 Type initialization exception: The type initializer for ‘System.UriParser’ threw an exception. was a scary bug at first sight but upon closer inspection, it appears to be an interaction between the harvesting environment that Heat creates and how NLog handles configuration. There might still be a bug in Heat but it appears to be limited in scope to how NLog works. We requested the reporter follow up with the NLog folks to see if they can figure out what Heat would need to do.

• Bug 4830 | Bind-time variable failing after migrating from WiX v3 to v4? is a new bug reported for WiX v4.0. As WiX v4.0 is still in active development, there were no cries of surprise at a bug in a deep feature. And so it went into the WiX v4.0 bucket.

• Bug 4831 | Bootstrapper hangs when detecting FilesInUse reported a bug in WiX v3.x around the use of the MsiPackage/@DisplayInternalUI attribute, which also caused no cries of surprise: There are many limitations with @DisplayInternalUI and extra messages are a chief cause. We opened the bug for WiX v3.x for someone adventurous enough to get into the nitty-gritty of threading, message pumps, and self-sealing stem bolts, two of which are real things.

• Bug 4832 | Unable to open wixproj file in Visual Studio if HarvestDirectory item contains MSBuild property in Include attribute is another instance of a bug reported by @rseanhall. As such, we closed this new one as a duplicate.

• Feature 4833 | Bootstrapped doesn’t respect BS_DEFPUSHBUTTON style wants support for default push buttons in custom WixStdBA themes. It’s not so much that it’s ignored but that ThmUtil needs to do extra work to handle default push buttons.

• Feature 4834 | Boostrapper should utilize ActionText table was declined because WixStdBA already handles ActionText entries from individual MSI packages and, even if it didn’t, Burn doesn’t have access to those entries at runtime.

• Bug 4835 | vs2015 installer build fails was another scary, scary bug that turned out to be not a bug. The error being reported turned out to be from a non-WiX task in a .wixproj MSBuild project.

• Bug 4836 | “‘darice.cub’ cannot be found” error pops up randomly reported an issue with “shadow copying” running Light.exe from a shadow location and failing to find files like darice.cub that it expects to find in the same directory. WiX doesn’t set up shadow copying so we declined this bug as being an environmental issue.

• Feature 4838 | Migrate burn design documents to OSS project site is a placeholder feature for @heaths to write a WIP to port some of the original Burn design documents to wixtoolset.org.

• Bug 4839 | Regression causing network performance degredation when checking remote payload hash is a bug that we’re keeping untriaged until Rob confirms the bug still exists.

• Bug 4841 | linker not resolving address when using vs2015 was another of the scary bugs that made me lose sleep. The user updated the issue to say it appeared to be an issue in Visual Studio 2015. We closed it with the recommendation to fix warnings—because warnings are our friends and we should eliminate them without mercy.

• Feature 4844 | Dynamic Burn bundle was a feature request for Burn to support dynamic bundles. It’s been a common request and the answer was provided in WiX v3.7: Bundles can query for, detect, and download updated bundles. Dynamic data requires a significantly different security model and isn’t something that’s being considered at the moment.

• Bug 4847 | Install button for installing Wix stays invisible reports a problem in the WiX v3.8 installer, that the Install button is hidden. That’s the behavior for both WiX v3.8 and v3.9 when a later version of WiX is installed. It’s not very clear what’s happening, so we took this bug in v3.11 to improve the user experience.

• Bug 4848 | WIX_ACCOUNT_ADMINISTRATORS does not work as expected when using it for permissions inside a merge module reports a problem using the OSInfo custom actions from a merge module. It appears that the otherwise excellent developer who originally wrote the OSInfo custom actions forgot to mark the properties @SuppressModularization="yes" so we took this bug for WiX v3.x and will consider public shaming of the aforementioned developer. (I’m voting no.)

• Bug 4849 | IIS 10 support - conditional IIS version detection reported that MSI considered 10 to be less than five. Unfortunately, that’s true; MSI always does string comparisons (so 1 < 5) rather than numeric comparisons. (See “Arithmetic operators are not supported”.) To work around this limitation, I opened a new feature request to provide discrete properties, like I did for Feature 4662 | Figure out how to handle .NET 4.x detection properties.

• Bug 4850 | Heat fails with error HEAT5305, when interpreting a path in an imported .targets file is another of this meeting’s Heat bugs. Unfortunately, it was too light on details to be actionable so we sent it back to the reporter to get more detail to see what we can do about it.