There's nothing quite like shipping some long-awaited software...except maybe immediately continuing the work to ship the next release. WiX v4 Preview Zero is now available!

Issue triage

WiX v4-preview.0 Status

The subset of WiX v4 that we planned to release as Preview Zero was released on 17-May as (eventually) planned. To summarize:

  • Preview Zero is a command-line-only release, providing wix.exe as a .NET tool available for installation from NuGet.org.
  • The most popular WiX extensions -- Util, UI, NetFx, and Bal -- were also published to NuGet.org.
  • MSI packages, merge modules, and bundles are supported.
  • The wix convert command converts WiX v3 authoring to v4.
  • MSBuild and patches aren't supported in Preview Zero.

So far, there's been a bit of download activity but not much in the way of reports, good or bad. Optimism says it means that everything that's supposed to work is working. As this is a preview and definitely not a "go-live" release ready for production, we're hoping for a bit of feedback about the conversion process and use of wix.exe as a .NET tool.

WiX v4-preview.1 Agenda

Work continues apace on the work we know we have in the queue to get WiX v4 to a feature-complete state:

  • Documentation
  • MSBuild support
  • Patching support

We also have issues -- bugs and feature requests -- that over time were assigned to both the WiX v4 milestones that we need to triage. So that's the plan for the next several (or more?) meetings: We'll triage the open v4 issues to determine which we think are still important to get into WiX v4.0, which can come later, and which we think are unlikely to get the team's less-than-copious free time -- and ways we can use labels and documentation and even blog posts to better communicate about them.