All our issues are about WiX v4. In fact, they're all about WiX v4.0-preview.1, which we've previously suggested could ship on Halloween. Will it? Well, see, Halloween is pretty scary, so read on for a schedule update.

Issue triage

  • Test regression on arm64, from @pbo-linaro, was opened since our last meeting and has already had lots of back and forth with Rob. The end result is that WiX v4 will include an ARM64-specific build of the WiX MSBuild tasks for .NET Framework. The .NET (Core? non-Framework? NuDotNet?) build already had an ARM64-specific build for Wix.exe and the MSBuild tasks, so this change brings the Framework-based build to parity. Yay for more ARM64!

  • Managed CustomAction projects show warning on Dependencies on load of project, from @robmen, comes from Rob experimenting with some of the new-fangled features in WiX v4; specifically, in this case, the ability to use DTF's managed-code custom action support as a PackageReference to the DTF custom action NuGet package. A pull request to fix it is already available.

  • Source line numbers on Converted messages refer to original source, from @robmen, is a usability problem in the WiX converter: It converts WiX v3 code but if that conversion means that the WiX authoring moves up or down a line, the line number reported in the message is off. Rob's pull request also fixes this one.

  • .wxl files still use inner text as the value for localized strings., from @robmen, is one language change we made throughout WiX v4, to eliminate the use of inner text in XML elements -- with one exception. Rob caught that we hadn't updated the .wxl file schema to use attributes instead of inner text. In what is probably not a surprise, Rob's pull request fixes this issue as well.

  • Schemas for Directx.wixext and UI.wixext are slightly missing, from @barnson, suggests that the developer -- whoever that may be -- who added compiler extensions to the DirectX and UI WiX extensions failed utterly to add a corresponding schema. As we're generating the schema reference documentation from the schemas, missing schemas mean missing documentation. I'm led to believe that people like documentation, so I volunteered to add the new schemas.

  • WixStdBA shouldn't set WixBundleFileVersion, from @barnson, came from my current work in updating documentation for WiX v4. WixBundleFileVersion is a Burn variable set by WixStdBA, to provide the version of the bundle .exe, in case it's different than WixBundleVersion, which is set by the Burn engine. (Why would those versions be different? Um...yeah, good question.) I found it a little odd that WixStdBA was setting a variable with a naming convention like the Burn engine and opened the issue for discussion. After not much discussion, we decided it was indeed a little odd, but not worth the effort to change, so this issue is now closed.

WiX v4.0-preview.1 status

Last meeting, we set a goal -- an ambitious one -- of shipping WiX v4.0-preview.1 on Halloween. As the days passed, we realized were going to, as they say, "come in hot." Though we were fixing the bugs at the rate we thought we could, there's a lot more to a release than just code. Documentation is a big one and we know it's going to be essential to get people using WiX v4. Most of what you know about WiX v3 is immediately useful in WiX v4, but some things have changed significantly, such as the fact WiX is now something you get as a NuGet package and not something you need to install. (Is that ironic? Or just Alanis ironic? Is an "Alanis ironic" reference dating me?)

We've decided to slip WiX v4.0-preview.1 a bit to give us more breathing room. Rob suggested we slip to 10-November, to celebrate Sesame Street Day but Sean pointed out that 11-November is Veterans Day. It also has the advantage of being an unambiguous date: 11/11 is guaranteed to be 11-November in the US and everywhere else.

So for an extra week and a half, we'll improving the XSD schemas to provide up-to-date reference documentation and ruthlessly prioritizing non-reference documentation to provide as good an introduction to WiX v4 as we can.

We'll check in at our next meeting on 10-November, hopefully with the good news that we're ready to release WiX v4.0-preview.1 the next day!