In a change of pace from the past couple of months, we're no longer working hard on and looking forward to releasing WiX v4 Preview One, because it was released as scheduled on 11-November. This should not come as a surprise to anyone reading this blog, because this blog is where we announced both and HeatWave, FireGiant's extension for WiX v4 in Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022. So now we've switched focus to working hard on and looking forward to release WiX v4 Release Candidate One in the near future. For details, read on.

Issue triage

  • includes quotes from quoted list, from @barnson, came from my own use of <?foreach?> in the UI.wixext extension. Given the weird way XML processing instructions are formatted, I prefer to use quotes where possible...and sometimes you discover that quotes aren't possible. Though he's not a fan of <?foreach?>, Rob agreed quotes should be supported, like they are for <?define?> and will fix this for -rc1.

  • wix v4 - Custom bootstrapper Command.CommandLine always empty, from @pwallner, is a possible misunderstanding of the command lines that Burn supplies to bootstrapper applications: Specifically, Burn strips the switches that it processes and hands over only the ones it doesn't understand and expects the BA to handle. We're keeping this issue open to confirm with the original reporter.

  • Add a DotNetCoreSdkSearch matching DotNetCoreSearch that search for installed SDKs instead of runtimes, from @powercode, requests a new feature to support the same logic for .NET SDKs as it does for .NET runtimes. Rob and Sean suggested it's probably a useful feature that should be a minimal adaptation of the original code. I took the hard-hearted approach that we shouldn't take on new features but agreed we should judge after we see the impact.

WiX v4.0-rc.1

As we've discussed in the past, we want to pay homage to our friends on the .NET team by shipping "RC" (release candidate) builds roughly every month. RC.1 is currently scheduled for 16-December and we're on track for that date, taking into consideration the incoming rate of bugs reported, the bugs we've already fixed, the bugs remaining to be worked on, tea leaves, entrails, and other standard practices of software divination. RC.2 would come about a month later, on 20-January. RC.3 would come in February and I'm betting you can predict the pattern for future RCs -- if they're needed. At some point, hopefully soon, we'll have fixed the bugs we're going to fix and it will be time to release WiX v4 and move on to the next release.

So celebrate the holiday season by bundling up with your warm beverage of choice and the latest WiX v4 release candidate so we can fix any bugs and ship WiX v4 early in the new year.