WiX Online Meeting 300 Highlights

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

I missed September's WiX Online Meeting because some of my internal organs decided to assert their dominance and we needed extended negotiations about who's in charge. But now I'm back, just in time to triage our latest batch of issues and talk about some ideas for WiX v7.

New issue triage

  • [nit] Confusing “error” log line that is not actually an error, from @dorssel, suggests that showing Error 0x0 in the log isn’t a good way of checking for an actual 0 value. Rob agreed and volunteered to clean up the logging.

  • Support prefer per-machine dual-mode MSI packages, from @robmen, proposes to add a package scope. Well, it’s not new because it already exists but can’t be expressed in WiX today. Dual-mode packages that can be installed either per-user or per-machine are supported with Package/Scope='perUserOrMachine' but that setting defaults to a per-user package. Rob wants the same dual-mode package setting but that defaults to a per-machine package and proposes Package/Scope='perMachineOrUser' for it. I tried but couldn’t find fault with the suggested name so Rob’s planning to implement it in WiX v7.

WiX v7 requests for comments

Rob brought up two issues that he wanted to get community feedback on. For details of the discussion, please dive into the video and comment.

  • Should WiX v7 target .NET 8 or .NET 10? .NET 8 is the current long-term servicing release of .NET but goes out of service next year, so we’d naturally lean toward targeting .NET 10. The only downside is that .NET 10 will be relatively new when WiX v7 comes out, so might not be on as many developer machines as .NET 8. We suspect that’s not a hard adoption blocker so .NET 10 is the currently leading choice.
  • WiX should have a way to make it explicit that the user accepts the Open Source Maintenance Fee. Because NuGet and MSBuild don’t enforce the NuGet requireLicenseAcceptance property, it’s easy to consume a NuGet package or MSBuild SDK (which is also a NuGet package) that requires the user to accept a EULA but to not even know there’s the EULA. Ideally, this is a problem solved at the NuGet/MSBuild layer but Microsoft doesn’t seem to agree so Rob’s proposing to solve it at the WiX layer instead with switches or MSBuild properties. Discussion is ongoing.
by Bob Arnson on Wednesday, October 15, 2025

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