WiX Online Meeting 311 Highlights

Ah, September, pumpkin-spice season and the beginnings of sweater weather. (Except here in the American midwest, it's 'shorts weather' until there's snow on the ground.) Here in the WiX repo, the summer vacation season meant we had only a few bugs to triage today. Luckily, they were interesting and, more importantly, Rob volunteered to take them, so I'm free and clear.

Issue triage

RedirectionGuard mitigation is inherited from WixStdBA when pressing the “Launch” button, from @reflectronic, reports that the RedirectionGuard feature that Rob added in WiX v7 affects processes launched from a WixStdBA theme after installation. RedirectionGuard, like other mitigations Windows lets processes opt in to, can’t be reduced after being set. So Rob gets to figure out if there’s a way to prevent it from being inherited by the BA process when Burn launches. Bonne chance!
Bundle’s own manifest.xml Hash for WixAttachedContainer doesn’t match actual bytes in the built .exe, from @nois6505, is an interesting bug for those who like low-level bit-twiddling (arguably among the top three best kinds of twiddling). The PE executable file format allows for Burn’s flexibility in supporting containers attached to the .exe and still supporting Authenticode signing and caching bundles without their attached containers but still validly signed. The reporter suggests there’s some more twiddling needed to handle bundles that aren’t aligned to an eight-byte boundary. Rob volunteered to investigate the twiddling.