WiX Online Meeting #79 Highlights

Today's meeting was a crisp half hour and focused, as one might expect, on the imminent release of WiX v3.10.

Issue triage

Bug 4869 | Incorrect source in “creating shortcut” documentation reports a bug in one of the WiX How-To documents. Well, that won’t do. So I took the bug myself to get it fixed on http://wixtoolset.org/ and in the WiX v3.11 wix.chm help file.
Feature 4870 | Preprocessor should support case-insensitive inequality is a feature request I opened when I discovered that the WiX preprocessor supports case-insensitive equality comparisons but all the other comparison operators are case-sensitive. The reaction was a bit muted but we opened the issue in v4.x.
Feature 4872 | Hability to run helper applications from burn is a feature request to support running executables as part of the Burn detect phase. BA functions—added to WiX v3.8 by Neil Sleightholm—support this kind of functionality just fine.
Bug 4873 | SWID tag in Bundle, installed on first install, then swidtag folder removed on Bundle (major)Upgrade is a bug in the recent SWID Tags-2 feature. Essentially, this is a problem when both bundles have the same name and install to the same directory—the .swidtag files have the same name and the major-upgraded bundle removes it. There are multiple workarounds: changing the bundle name, installation directory, or using the Name attribute to override the default. We took the bug in v4.x to see if we can improve the behavior.
Bug 4875 | Root Certificate install fails with code 26352 is a bug in the certificate installer custom actions that’s been discussed before but was last tested as fixed in 2010. (Remember, folks, the way to get a bug on the radar is to file it.) We took this bug in v3.x and asked for information to reproduce the bug.
Bug 4876 | Burn packages crash with STATUS_ILLEGAL_INSTRUCTION on old hardware reports that, starting with Visual Studio 2012, the Visual C++ compiler defaulted to enabling the use of SSE2 instructions, which some (very, I argue) old CPUs don’t support. We suspect Burn doesn’t much benefit from SSE2 instructions so we took the issue, though not for v3.10 because changing how the compiler generates code is not something you do at the last minute, thank you very much.
Bug 4878 | dutil’s IniUtil leaks memory is a simple, straightforward bug report that can’t really be expanded upon. We took the bug for v3.11.
Bug 4879 | SWID Tag in x64 MSI Product results in LGHT0204 This 32bitComponent uses 64BitDirectory WixTagFolder is another SWID Tags-2 bug. As this bug prevents SWID tags from working with 64-bit MSI packages, we took this bug (and the @firegiantco pull request) for WiX v3.10. Rob volunteered to follow up with people who reported SWID tags bugs since RC2 to ensure the fix resolves the bug.
Feature 4880 | Add support for detecting VS15 comes from @heaths to add support for the hypothetical next version of Visual Studio. We’ll happily take that for WiX v3.11 and v4.0.

WiX v3.10

As predicted last week, RC2 was released last Wednesday. Rob and I both announced it. A few bugs were reported, one of which we decided to take a fix for. Consensus during today’s meeting was that as long as the fix can be verified, we’re still on track to release on Labor Day, or, perhaps, Labour Day.