Our meeting last month had a surprise from Sean and this one does too, of a different sort. And happy early birthday to Rob!
Issue triage
- If Launch after Repair with standard bootstrapper, error if then try to Change or Uninstall., from @kmackey1, demonstrates an oddity when launching an app from a WixStdBA-based bundle: The Programs & Features applet seems to be waiting for any process launched by the bundle, even though the bundle processes themselves have shut down. Working around that behavior might take some effort, so we took the issue into WiX v4.x for investigation.
WiX v4 status report
With the new WiX v4 patch-build process validated -- wix build patch.wxs -out patch.msp is all you need -- Rob reported on the major pieces left before we can declare a prerelease build of WiX v4.0:
- Wrapping up patch support
- Consumption of merge modules
- Instance transforms
A FireGiant customer is adopting WiX v4.0 already and is successful in building MSI packages, so large parts of the system are ready for use at large scale.
More news as progress continues into spring.
WiX v3.14 status report
WiX v3.14 is getting some fixes and features:
- A fix for MakeSfxCA.exe Could not find a part of the path to avoid weird errors when including many references (or fewer references with very long paths) in a managed-code custom action.
- A workaround for Bundle - pipe broke by AntiVirus software to add retry logic for virulent anti-virus products that interrupt bundle launches.
- Support for the ARM64 platform in the core WiX toolset #5558.
A build with all those changes will be out next week.