WiX Online Meeting #82 Highlights

Issue triage

• Bug 4904 | NetFx46Web has wrong file name is a bug I opened while investigating Bug 4898. Though this bug didn’t have anything to do with #4898, it’s a bug nonetheless and as I might have had something to do with introducing it, decided to take it in WiX v3.11 and v4.0.

• Bug 4903 | Missing documentation on how to get the Wix Standard Bootstrapper application WixStandardBootstrapperApplication.Foundation to work says there’s missing documentation on the bootstrapper application set WixStandardBootstrapperApplication.Foundation. We discussed it and agreed that WixStandardBootstrapperApplication.Foundation shouldn’t be documented, as it’s used internally for the other WixStdBA sets and isn’t needed to use a custom theme. We took the bug to update the doc and ensure that custom themes are correctly documented.

• Bug 4902 | MSI built with 3.10 fails to install on XP is an interesting bug that was briefly a scary, scary bug. Luckily, it turns out that WiX v3.10 doesn’t have a general problem running on Windows XP. However, this particular custom action does fail when running on Windows XP. It appears to be a problem with Visual Studio 2015 code generation, or at least, the problem does not occur when the custom action is built with Visual Studio 2013. I took the bug in WiX v3.11 to investigate possible workarounds.

• Feature 4900 | MakeSfxCA.exe should validate specified app.config file. is a request for validation to prevent confusion about Bug 4891 | EmbeddedUI hosting doesn’t respect “*.config” embedded by MakeSfxCA.exe. We love validation and error prevention, so we took it in WiX v4.0.

• Bug 4899 | return values of xmlutil functions are not being consistent… was the result of a recent wix-users thread that showed a bug in how WixStandardBootstrapperApplication attributes are handled at runtime. Jacob agreed to take this bug and fix it for both WiX v3.11 and WiX v4.0. In WiX v4.0, the fix encompasses the bigger change of eliminating the use of S_FALSE return values. If you’d like to discuss S_FALSE on the wix-devs mailing list, you’ll fit in just fine on wix-devs.

• Bug 4898 | Failed to acquire payload: NetFx46Web … error: 0x80070002 appears to report a behavior difference between WixNetfxExtension support for .NET 4.0 and the newly-introduced .NET 4.6. However, in reading the logs, it appears that a custom bootstrapper application isn’t responding to source resolution with a request to download the .NET package.

• Feature 4897 | Download msi packages during compilation if missing wants Light.exe to download files if they’re not found locally and a download location is available. That idea didn’t go over well; nobody was thrilled with the idea of build machines going out to the Internet instead of reporting a missing file when one is specified. It’s possible for a binder extension to do this, though, for those so inclined.

• Bug 4894 | Lit does not accept binder-specific command line arguments says that Lit.exe can’t parse custom command-line arguments like Light.exe does for binder extensions. We agree it should be able to and that we would take such a change in WiX v3.11 if it’s small and isolated. We also agreed we should start requiring changes in WiX v4.x before we take them in WiX v3.x. That will help avoid the need to cherry-pick changes across repos, something Sean has done several times.

• Bug 4892 | .Net 4.5.1 compiler failing was unchanged from last week. We asked again for more data.

• Bug 4885 | RunOnce is triggered during installation on Windows7 x86 systems came back from last week with a publicly-available link for logs, so I took it to investigate the logs and report back for next week’s online meeting.