Today we were going to spend some time discussing an open WiX v4 design question but decided instead that we'd spend a fair amount of time discussing one of our new, untriaged issues. See if you can guess which one it is.

Issue triage

  • ProcessorArchitecture variable reports the wrong value for x64 bundle on ARM64, from @ericstj, reports that Windows 11, with its support for emulating x64 code when running on an ARM64 machine, is a lying liar who lies about the native hardware. Burn uses the GetNativeSystemInfo API function, which one might assume returns, you know, the native information about the system. Unfortunately, from an x86 process on Windows 11 running on ARM64, GetNativeSystemInfo says the machine is x64. That makes it difficult to, for example, install an ARM64 package on an ARM64 machine. Luckily, @ericstj, Member Emeritus in Good Standing of the WiX Virtual Team, knew the right API function to call to get the actual machine architecture, opened this issue, and implemented the fix for both WiX v3.14 and WiX v4. We agreed to take this issue in both WiX v3.14 and v4 and to review the pull requests and get builds out as soon as reasonably practical.

  • WiX4 Feature Request: Support external IHeatExtensions, from @hymccord, suggests that in WiX v4, Heat.exe doesn't support extensions. The evidence suggests that is indeed the case. Fixing that problem itself is straightforward and @hymccord has done so and also found a few other differences between WiX v3 and v4 when implementing Heat extensions. We agreed a pull request would likely be met with much rejoicing.

  • Properties and imports in *.wixproj.user don't work correctly in Votive, from @zdavidsen, reports that Votive doesn't properly load imported projects from .wixproj.user files. This wasn't terribly surprising, but @zdavidsen has some ideas and experiments to verify and offered to open a pull request if the results were successful. Yes, please!