WiX Online Meeting #115 Highlights

Issue triage

• Value containing !(wix) variable is used before being resolved, from @mediawolf, points out that when you use a bind-time variable like !(wix.WixVariable) as an attribute value, sometimes that value is used literally in other places. Sometimes the compiler uses one value to provide default values for other attributes, because it’s helpful that way. But it expects the real value and a variable reference that won’t be resolved until bind time isn’t too useful. We agreed a warning would be useful before using such a value as a default for another; we took the issue in WiX v3.x.

• Add support to detect and install VSIX packages into VS15, from @heaths, requests support for the new-fangled extension installation model used in Visual Studio 2017, which is incompatible with that used in previous versions of Visual Studio. Heath promises a WIP, which we’ll eagerly review for WiX v3.11.

• Native BootstrapApplication payloads folder isn’t added to LoadLibrary search path, from @nirbar, suggests that a bootstrapper application cannot implicitly load DLLs that are delivered as BA payloads. That seems like a limitation we would have seen before so we need to dig more deeply to better understand the issue. We took this into WiX v3.11.

• Wix310.exe installer does not detect .net 3.5 on Server 2012R2, from @kentonbmax, reports a problem with the WiX v3.10 bundle not correctly detecting .NET 3.5.1. We couldn’t reproduce the problem but logging shows it so we opened this issue in WiX v3.x for future investigation.

• candle.exe -ss reports incorect switch -sfdvital in warning message, from @jozefizso, shows that sometimes, even the best of us succumbs to copy-n-paste error. We’ll fix this in WiX v3.11.