WiX Online Meeting 307 Highlights

We held our last meeting a week early so it's been five weeks between meetings. It took a little bit to get back into the groove of things. Luckily, we had a relatively small number of bugs and none that suggested I inadvertently introduced a bunch of bugs into the recently-released WiX v7. So things are looking up as we look forward to Northern Hemisphere summer.

Issue triage

WiX-created installer doesn’t consider temporarily set environment variable during silent installation, from @ColinFinck, is an interesting demonstration of the architecture of Windows Installer. Even per-user packages are installed by the MSI service; it runs elevated and impersonates the user. When you run a package with UI, the UI runs in the user context and then control passes over to the service. In the case of a silent install, the entire installation happens in the service, so environment variables that are set from the command processor (and not set “permanently” in the registry) are not passed to the MSI service. Unfortunately that’s entirely in how MSI is implemented and WiX can’t change that.
Strings are truncated on ProgressDlg. I have tried to override the default progressdialog and move the progress bar a bit lower. Then the issue is fixed. But, when I do that the default Progress Dialog from WiX is coming up like a splash screen as soon as the installer is launched., from @Diwakar2435, has a very long title but the bug appears to be in the first sentence. I don’t see it on my machine—It Works on My Machine™—but the Windows Installer internal UI is still very much a 1990s phenomenon, so it’s not surprising it might not be perfect in scaling. This issue is up for grabs for pixel-level tweaking.
Cancelling Burn installation leave process hanging after closing, from @petm2022, provides details about what appears to be a timing bug when using Burn’s support for parallel package caching. Parallel caching isn’t the default so likely is missing sufficient test coverage and general usage. This issue is up for grabs to investigate.
Quick Start still references WiX 6.0.0 and Light theme button text is difficult to read, both from @heaths, reflect the joys of maintaining Web sites. Luckily, Rob loves Web stuff like Node, TypeScript, and CSS, so he volunteered to fix these.
Cancel a Burn installation with non-vital msi packages does not rollback, from @petm2022, is an interesting case of how Burn handles non-vital packages. When a non-vital package fails, Burn ignores the error. In this case, the “error” is that the user canceled the installation. Burn cancels the installation but by ignoring the error, decides that a rollback isn’t necessary. That seems wrong, so this issue is up for grabs to investigate.