Welcome to the first WiX Online Meeting of Northern Hemisphere Spring 2019! Today we enjoy the dulcet sounds of leaf blowers cleaning up the detritus of fall.

Issue triage

  • Votive 2017 2019 with no workloads, from @chrpai, reports that if you happened to have installed a barebones Visual Studio with no workloads, attempting to create a new WiX project from Votive templates fails. Installing Visual Studio with no workloads is probably not very common, but we decided to ask FireGiant's Visual Studio extensibility guru whether there's a Visual Studio component Votive can declare a dependency on to keep templates working as expected.

  • Default for ServiceInstall vital attribute not documented, from @breyed, is a two-fer issue: One, the ServiceInstall/@Vital attribute's default value isn't documented and two, that the default should be yes. We had a similar issue with the File/@Vital default value back in the late 2000 aughts. Changing the default for Vital attributes to yes makes the most sense but breaks the general rule that the default value for attributes that aren't specified in an element is no (or its moral equivalent). Renaming the attribute to keep a no default is problematic unless we can find a good name; Nonvital="yes"? Unimportant="yes"? Anyway, we took the issue to resolve the missing documentation and better default in WiX v4.0.

  • ServiceConfig Windows Installer reference is incorrect, from @breyed, reports a bad link in the WiX documentation. That's something easy to fix. Rob volunteered to do so for the next WiX v3.14 build.