WiX Online Meeting 254 Highlights

What's that ticking sound? Just an anachronistic callback to clocks as we count down the last few days before the scheduled ship date of WiX v4!

WiX v4 release plan

This is it...almost. We're still on course for shipping WiX v4 on 5-April, WiX's bronze anniversary. We decided to hold one last meeting on 4-April, for a go/no-go launch decision. So that meeting is "it." Tune in!

Issue triage

• wix 4 - .net 7 HarvestProject missing .exe file, from @narcis-ro, seems like a scary bug but it's due to a long-standing change in how .NET (Core) projects build. The typical Build target is great for debugging but for deployment purposes, you need to run the Publish target (including via the dotnet publish command line). I asked out loud whether there was a standard output group created from the output of a Publish call; frequent live attendee Zac said yes and pointed to the apparently undocumented PublishItemsOutputGroup output group. Problem solved.

• Wix4 Bundle Projects don't handle Reference Projects with Spaces in the Name, from @ld0614, turned from a bug into a documentation omission, which was then fixed by adding documentation. Again, problem solved.

• PrereqLicenseFile won't compile despite PrereqPackage attribute being set, from @ld0614, is a minor bug in the WixToolset.Bal.wixext compiler. Sean fixed it and added a regression unit test but, given that we shipped RC4 and RTM is around the corner, prompted a discussion in the PR about the "bug bar" for WiX v4 RTM. (It's a metaphorical bar, more like the bar in a hurdle than a bar with adult beverages. We talk about "raising the bar" when we want to reduce the number of changes going into a product before it ships. So the bar is definitely part of a hurdle and not, say, a limbo bar, because then bugs could simply walk underneath it.) We decided that bug-fix pull requests with unit tests or end-to-end system tests that did enough validation to not need another round of user validation could still come in. But we'll be critical of the kind of bug (high priority) and fix (low impact).

• Page Not Found: /docs/fourthree_bundles/, from @dal958, happens to have caught Google having indexed a new (and extensive) page about Burn that Sean pushed on Saturday and that I then reorganized on Monday. I added some redirects but I volunteered to look at adding some more. I also promise to stop reorganizing the doc. For a while, anyway.

• Merge modules fails to build from heatwave & msbuild, from @iwarp, is a real bug and therefore falls under the aforementioned definitely-not-a-limbo-bar bug bar. Rob submitted a pull request but is going to take another look at the tests to ensure it meets our definitely-not-a-pub testing bar.

• Heatwave 0.9.5 VS build event macros are not expanded in bundle projects, from @QuickWire, isn't a bug but instead exposes some of the gorier details of MSBuild SDK-style projects and MSBuild evaluation order. The good news is that when embrace the modern ways of doing things, you can mostly ignore the gory bits.

• wix4 rc4 HeatWave project output type missing Patch option, from @narcis-ro, points out that wix.targets supports patch output from a .wixproj but FireGiant's HeatWave does not. Rob points out that patch outputs are in more of a "we did the bare minimum but nothing to validate it actually works" bucket. This issue is up for grabs for someone to finish the patch output support and I opened an issue for the HeatWave team to consider "experimental" support for patch and other output types.