WiX Online Meeting #95 Highlights

WiX v3.10.2 update

We released WiX v3.10.2 as planned on 20-January. You can read the announcement and details on Setup Matters and download the release.

Unfortunately, users have reported two bugs since the release: managed-code bootstrapper applications that use WinForms crash and the /layout switch without an explicit destination directory downloads files to the clean room directory instead of the original bundle directory.

@jchoover helpfully provided a fix for the /layout bug. The WinForms issue, we’re told by Microsoft, is a bug in GDI+ when using SetDefaultDllDirectories, an important mitigation of the Windows vulnerability WiX v3.10.2 provides. WinForms and, likely, a native bootstrapper application that uses GDI+ to manage fonts expose this GDI+ bug. (WixStdBA uses old-school GDI for font management, so isn’t affected by this bug.)

Both bugs are serious enough that we agreed a new release is necessary. However, we don’t currently have enough information to know how (or even whether) it’s possible for Burn to work around the GDI+ bug. Until we know more, we agreed to wait in the hopes we can quickly provide a workaround and package it and the /layout bug fix in a WiX v3.10.3.

We’ll provide updates as we learn more.

Issue triage

We closed a few issues that we’d kept open for the reporter to provide needed information. Reporter can reopen issues but after a few weeks, we move issues out of the triage bucket if we can’t make any headway on them.

• warning MSB3277: Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly #5186 reports a set of build-time warnings in WiX itself. @BMurri reported the issue and provided pull requests to fix it in both WiX v3.11 and WiX v4.0 which we merged.

• Property related crash when loading WiX project in Visual Studio #5187 is a Votive bug similar to Votive thinks BindInputPaths are content #4493 in Votive’s support for non-relative item groups. We took it in WiX v3.x.

• Unable to cast object of type ‘Microsoft.Tools.WindowsInstallerXml.VisualStudio.WixFileNode’ to type ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Package.FolderNode’. #5188 is another Votive bug. We asked for a bit more information but took the bug in WiX v3.x in the meantime.

• Add a MultiInstance attribute to the MajorUpgrade element #5189 requests support for multi-instance major upgrades. Because of the breadth of the likely change, we took this as a request for WiX v4.0.

• Problem with VS2013 and WiX 3.8 #5190 reported a change in behavior when converting from WiX v3.5 to v3.8. The change is at runtime, so we suggested the user send mail to wix-users.

• layout: Default directory broken with clean room implementation. #5193 is the bug mentioned above about the Burn engine /layout switch.