WiX Online Meeting 272 Highlights

Here in the United States, the recent Thanksgiving holiday serves as the unofficial start of winter, the winter holiday season, overly-indulgent shopping, six weeks of "holiday diet cheat days" -- it all ties together. In that vein, Rob and I signed up for a couple more WiX v5 work items even as the new year (and our first scheduled prerelease of WiX v5) rapidly approaches...

Issue triage

Anonymous Directory Ids Inconsistent, from @chrpai, suggests that in some cases, using Subdirectory in different elements to create the same target directories doesn’t always create the same directory ids. Rob had noticed this as well and took the issue to investigate and make consistent in WiX v5.
Add Nupkeg readmes, from @barnson, most comes from the fact that having readmes in your NuGet packages is beneficial to WiX’s hundreds of thousands of users…and, perhaps, because not having them bloats the build with a bunch of annoying warnings. Meh, either way, we should fix it, something I volunteered to do for WiX v5’s NuGet packages.
. error DARK0182 : Cannot find the table definitions for the ’ ISDRMFiIe’ table. This is likely due to a typing dark. exe error or missing extension. Please ensure all the necessary extensions are supplied on the command line with the -ext parameter., from @rajeshvku, reports an error decompiling an MSI package with a custom table using Dark.exe. Requests for additional information went unanswered so we closed the issue pending a reproduction using WiX v4. Remember, we don’t ask for more information for the fun of it; it’s almost always the only way to get to an issue we can do something with, especially in cases like this one, where it’s entirely dependent on a piece of data we don’t have.
When using the MSI internal UI bootstrapper application (wixiuiba), the MSI internal UI appears behind other windows, from @cstavaru, reports problems with window focus handling using the new-to-WiX-v4 WixInternalUIBootstrapperApplication BA. Window handling is tricky, especially as processes create new windows and destroy old ones. Nobody wants processes to be able to randomly steal the focus even this is clearly the most important thing you’ll see ever. This issue is up for grabs for investigation.
Find and Replace, from @computerquip-work, requests a feature that, in a bit of time slipping, already exists in WiX v4, though it’s pretty well hidden. One of the advantages of our annual release cadence is that we won’t forget the little features we slipped in. Well, we’re less likely to forget, anyway.