WiX Online Meeting 305 Highlights

Today we held our last meeting before the (scheduled) release of WiX v7 on 6-April. There were no ship-stopping issues for us to triage—but it's not too late to find a bug that sounds so bad it spikes our blood pressure. Go test WiX v7.0.0-rc.2 and see what you can find.

WiX v7 checkin

WiX v7.0.0-rc.2 shipped on schedule on 5-Mar. Having paid the cost in pain and blood from Azure code-signing issues in v7.0.0-rc.1, we were better prepared for another signed release, with only minor hiccups.

As of writing, there are no open issues to be fixed in WiX v7. If there are bugs remaining—and there almost certainly are—we’d love to get them fixed before shipping v7. If they aren’t fixed by then, they sit on the bench waiting for WiX v8.0.0-rc.1 next year.

Until proven otherwise, WiX v7 is on schedule for release on 6-April.

Issue triage

Fix WiX v7 package dependencies, from @robmen, keeps WiX v7 compatible with both Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio 2026. Rob got this fix in for WiX v7.0.0-rc.2.
Configurable-scope bundle can get a partial detected state, from @barnson, was a bug we discovered working with a FireGiant customer that’s adopting configurable-scope bundles. (Yay!) Unfortunately, this fix came in after WiX v7.0.0-rc.2 so will be in WiX v7 “RTM” next month. It’s also available in development builds on GitHub.
Do not run MakeSfxCA during design-time builds, from @mediawolf, requests an optimization to avoid unnecessary builds of custom actions before a real build. That seems reasonable, so this issue is now up for grabs.
Tests fail in devbuild for 7.0.2 if Visual Studio 2022 is not installed, from @marcOcram, suggests that Visual Studio 2026 is not solely supported for building WiX. Sad, but true. Unfortunately, the GitHub Actions build VMs we rely on to build WiX releases doesn’t yet support Visual Studio 2026, so we’re stuck relying on Visual Studio 2022. WiX v8 could switch entirely to Visual Studio 2026, so this issue is now up for grabs.