Today marks the 15th Anniversary of the WiX Toolset's release as Open Source. The impact of this "relatively insignificant geekware tool" (Time, 10 May, 2004) over the last decade and a half is profound. The largest software companies in the world use WiX to create installation packages for their flagship products. When FireGiant launched nearly six years ago, we offered enterprise support for WiX and more companies—of all sizes, across all industries—adopted the toolset. In addition, there are countless Open Source projects that have MSI-based installation packages thanks to WiX. We are proud of the work we've done with WiX over the years, but the future excites us even more.
At FireGiant, we contribute significantly to the development of WiX. Today our focus is on WiX v4. WiX v4 modernizes the toolset to seamlessly integrate into a development world driven by continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). We also work on features in WiX v4 to improve the WiX language itself, such as anonymous identifiers and inline directory syntax. At the same time, we develop additional value-added tools on top of WiX that make developers even more productive. And we are just getting started on developer productivity.
In closing, I want to tell you a story. At a Microsoft partner event last year (FireGiant gets invited to a lot of these given the amount of work we do with Microsoft), we were given a preview of WinForms and WPF integration into .NET Core 3.0. That news surprised many of us in the audience. The Microsoft representative quickly explained that WinForms and WPF were important to the future of .NET Core because Windows desktop application development remained at an all-time high. The trajectory of Visual Studio usage for desktop development usage was not slowly downward, as some might fear, nor was it flat, as we had actually hoped; instead, it's rising, which is exciting. The demand for installation packages is expected to be strong for years to come.
Oh, and speaking of .NET Core, its installation package is also built with WiX.
So, celebrate WiX's 15th Anniversary with us and get excited about the next 15 years.