WiX Online Meeting 298 Highlights

Today's meeting was the shortest we've had a long time because we had Technical Difficulties™ getting both Rob and me being able to talk on the stream. The distance between Washington and Michigan makes two cans connected by string mildly impractical. Nevertheless, we persisted and managed to triage a luckily-short list of new issues.

New issue triage

Use —recurse-containers in latest sign.exe, from @robmen, is a bit of housekeeping for Rob to simplify how we sign official builds of WiX.
Bundle Patch does not uninstall updated msi when uninstall when “-burn.related.patch” parameter, from @JasonLow8, is tied to a pull request that fixes one of the edgier cases of Burn’s related bundle behavior with patch bundles. Rob agreed to dig into the existing behavior and review the pull request.
OK button doesn’t work in “Change destination folder” with custom UI, from @pfusik, turns out to be a behavior change introduced in WiX v6 that the person who implemented the change didn’t document as a breaking change. But we shouldn’t be too harsh on such people; they mean well and almost always do the right thing, so let’s forgive them, shall we? I volunteered to write up a breaking change blurb in the release notes.
Decompiler should handle Scope=perUserOrMachine, from @barnson, came up when I was playing with perUserOrMachine packages and bundles (as one does in one’s spare time). The decompiler could and should do a better job at decompiling such packages and now it does.
Scale bundle splash screens better, from @barnson, was a result of much experimentation with monitors, screen sharing, and eyesight. I personally use monitors with enough pixels that I always use some kind of scaling to keep fonts and widgits reasonably sized—it turns out that such scaling makes it difficult to see a bitmap the same way someone else sees it if they have different or no scaling on their monitors. (And no, it’s not enough to just turn off scaling, because then pixels get too small for my old/bad eyes to see. I knew I should’ve kept one of my old CRT monitors!) Eventually, we confirmed that yes, indeed, the scaling that Burn does for splash screens produces some pretty bad artifacts for splash screens that contain text (especially). In the long term, Rob and I agreed that Burn should support multiple splash screen bitmaps and a concept of qualifiers to choose the best match. In the short term, we’re experimenting with ways we can do splash screen scaling with fewer artifacts. Wish us luck.