As we discussed earlier this year, WiX v3 faces a deadline for the end of community support. That deadline has arrived.
WiX v3 and WiX v4 are no longer in community support
Thursday, February 6, 2025
As of today, there will be no future public releases of WiX v3. To be clear, that means there will be no future public releases of WiX v3, even if a security vulnerability is discovered. Apologies for the bold, but we don’t want anybody to miss it. (FireGiant’s Extended WiX Toolset support offers ongoing security support.)
WiX v3.0 was released over 15 years ago. Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and almost the entire lifetime of Windows 10 have passed since. It predates all of .NET Core. WiX v3 doesn’t support “modern” Windows development practices, like integrating into dotnet build.
Its time has come and gone.
So now’s well past the time to upgrade to WiX v4…
Well, not quite. Because WiX v4 is also out of community security support.
The WiX lifecycle lays it out:
Specifically, security updates are provided for the current major version and the previous major version up to 10 months after the current version’s release. … This provides consumers with security updates for 22 months and ensures they are protected while updating to the latest major version.
For WiX v4, those 22 months of free security support ended yesterday. (Yes, the timing of the lifecycle announcement meant that WiX v4 went out of community support one day before WiX v3.)
As of today, you should be using WiX v5.
As of next week, you should be testing your projects on WiX v6-rc.1 to prepare for its release in April.