WiX Online Meeting #97 Highlights

WiX v3.10.3 update

As promised, here’s this week’s update on WiX v3.10.3:

No change from last week.

Rob poked some people at Microsoft to encourage movement but so far we don’t have information about a fix or workaround for the GDI+ bug that breaks WinForms managed bootstrapper applications.

Issue triage

• CAQuietExec in defered mode does not runs a 64 bit proccess #5197 comes from @efraimN who reports that CAQuietExec doesn’t run as a 64-bit process. The 64-bit custom action variants are 32-bit but know to turn off file-system redirection before launching the actual process. I’d previously asked the user to post their authoring but haven’t yet received a reply. We’ll wait and keep the issue open for another week.

• Issue with running WiX UI (InstallDir/Minimal) in minimized mode. #5204, from @TimMayert, points out that if you minimize a dialog in an MSI package built with WixUI while it’s installing, it will come back with the dialog mostly off-screen. You can actually reproduce this behavior with an MSI package that doesn’t use WixUI or even one that’s not built with WiX. (Do such things still exist?) So this is a problem inherent in MSI’s UI support and not something we can work around in WixUI.

• Wix 3.10.1 - Burn: Adding a big payload to a bundle crashes light #5205 is from @dsed and reports an exception when adding a 2.5GB(!) MSI package to a Burn bundle. We hate when exceptions leak and crash a WiX tool. And though you couldn’t create a compressed bundle that big, Burn supports external payloads that big and a bit bigger: about 18 quintillion bytes, plus or minus a few million billion. So we took this bug in WiX v3.x, to correct the build-tool side bug that limits the size to a 32-bit integer.

• Burn ShowFilesInUse and Windows XP #5208, from @eteeuw-groeneveld, says that the files-in-use dialog in WiXStdBA has no effect in Windows XP. Given that Windows XP doesn’t support Restart Manager, it’s likely that either WixStdBA isn’t correctly handling the old-school files-in-use messages or that Burn isn’t sending them. If the former, we’d consider a fix in WiX v3.x, so we took the bug there for research.

Pull request review

This week’s pull request implemented a long-sought and frequently +1’d feature: Support for .NET Framework 4.6.1. New contributor @FabienLavocat provided pull requests for both WiX v4.0 and WiX v3.x. Not-as-new contributor @rseanhall provided feedback on both, leaving just a quick review from Rob.