Not every meeting can be an email but that doesn't mean we need to hold every meeting all the time. We'll be meeting slightly less often, at least for the time being, but it doesn't mean we love you all any less. Read on for our new meeting schedule.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

The frequency is monthly. Apparently, I've too frequently referred to our "fortnightly" meetings so Rob decided we should meet less often, at least at this point in the WiX v6 development cycle. So, starting next month, we'll hold our meetings monthly, on the third Tuesday of every month. That means our next meeting is on 21-May, which, somewhat confusingly, is just three weeks from today. The meeting after that one is on 18-June and establishes the pattern going forward.

Issue triage

  • wix burn extract -out extracts bundle contents without names when -outba is not specified, from @ssrmm, points out that if you extract attached containers from a bundle without also extracting the bootstrapper application container, you get less-than-useful names like a0 for the extracted files. It turns out that if you also extract the BA container, the wix burn extract subcommand has the Burn manifest that it can use to figure out the actual file names. This is as-designed though personally I'd prefer wix burn extract worked like dark -x does in WiX v3: It should extract both containers and not make me choose or specify both. This issue is up for grabs and would make an interesting introduction to hacking on WiX code.

  • Standard bootstrapper options page moves focus to install location field every time a checkbox is toggled, from @ssrmm, reports what I believe is a change in behavior in the ThmUtil library underlying WixStdBA themes. But it seems like a weird behavior change, so I'm guessing it's unintentional---which is sometimes rudely referred to as a bug--- and volunteered to take a look.

  • Wix v4 convert fails with File elements with only an Id attribute, from @tjlakixi, reports that if you have a WiX v3 project with a File element and an Id attribute without Name or Source, wix convert fails to convert that authoring to an equivalent in WiX v4 (or v5). The most likely cause of that failure is that neither Rob nor I could remember that was legal in WiX v3. It's probably pretty rare to run into that particular bit of authoring but we took the issue up for grabs for someone who wanted to cover all the bases.

  • Bal extension shows damaged with wix 5, from @metsma, is another report about extensions used from the wix.exe .NET tool. It turns out this is specifically a problem with the WixToolset.Bal.wixext WiX extension NuGet package. To maintain compatibility with WiX v4, Rob created WixToolset.Bal.wixext that's essentially an alias for the new (better) name of WixToolset.BootstrapperApplications.wixext. That works great when consuming the NuGet package with MSBuild, but wix.exe doesn't like that the NuGet package name doesn't match the name of the assembly in it. Rob added documentation to explain this behavior.