On Friday, we shipped WiX v5 and celebrated WiX’s 20th anniversary. So, yay, right? Definitely. Yet in the past week alone, we had: The xz backdoor, wherein someone volunteered to help a burned-out maintainer and after more than two years inserted a backdoor vulnerability into the liblzma library. (Guess which library I’ve been looking at for adding LZMA support to Burn?) There’s lot of speculation and not much evidence about who’d put two years into being an (apparently) good co-maintainer and turn out to be a bad actor....
WiX v4.0.1 released
Two months to the day after shipping WiX v4, we’ve shipped the WiX v4.0.1 bug-fix release. WiX v4.0.1 follows the Embarrassment-Driven Development (EDD) methodology: Is it embarrassing that a particular bug slipped through? If so, fix it, ship an update, and pretend it never existed in the first place. A few bugs discovered (or at least reported) after WiX v4 shipped were embarrassing enough to fix right away. They’re now fixed, so update your ....
WiX v4 released
Today is the 19th anniversary of the first time WiX code was available outside the Microsoft firewall. (Among other important anniversaries. WiX v4 is now out. See the release notes for details. Go upgrade your projects! In the long ago, I announced how I’d be managing the WiX v3.x series of releases. It was also how we announced that work on WiX v4 would begin and how we’d be doing things differently this time:...
Bob's Favorite Things: WiX v4 Preview 1 Edition
WiX v4-preview.1 has been released. You can read my artisanal release notes here. There are a lot of new things in WiX v4, a lot of which are hidden inside the guts of the compiler, linker, and backends. Here are my favorite user-visible features: Platforms WiX has supported all the platforms Windows Installer supports, including Itanium back in the day and 32-bit Arm back when only Microsoft-blessed companies could ship native Arm binaries....
Building WiX v4, the saga, part 1
WiX Toolset v4-preview.0 is available. For more information, see Rob’s blog post on the matter. As I mentioned before, almost all custom actions are build for all the platforms WiX v4 supports, which now includes the relatively-new (at least on Windows) ARM64 platform. Unfortunately, building ARM64 has exposed a bug in Visual Studio 2019; intermittently, but often enough to break most WiX v4 builds, the C++ compiler will crash with this oh-so-helpful error message:...
WiX v4 Random Fact No. 5
WiX Toolset v4-preview.0 is available. For more information, see Rob’s blog post on the matter. Yesterday I mentioned that The -arch switch (and synonym switch -platform) on the wix.exe command line determine the set of platform-specific Burn engines and custom actions that will be included. I undersold the point. It’s true that -arch/-platform offer that functionality. It’s similar to how I described -arch’s ability to simplify your authoring 11 years ago:...
WiX v4 Random Fact No. 4
WiX Toolset v4-preview.0 is available. For more information, see Rob’s blog post on the matter. In WiX v3, Burn and the extension custom actions were mostly built on 32-bit foundations that knew how to talk to 64-bit systems when necessary. For example, most of the custom actions ran as 32-bit DLLs but could disable the redirection that typically keeps 32-bit code out of the 64-bit portion of the file system and registry....
WiX v4 Random Fact No. 3
WiX Toolset v4-preview.0 is available. For more information, see Rob’s blog post on the matter. Building WiX v4 is quite a bit easier than it was building WiX v3. That said, there are still some steps you need to take that prevent it from being a purely out-of-the-box experience. One problem you might run into – I know, because I did – is that if you have an alias or the MSBuild autoresponse file MSBuild....
WiX v4 Random Facts Nos. 1 and 2
WiX Toolset v4-preview.0 is available. For more information, see Rob’s blog post on the matter. In WiX v3, Candle.exe is the WiX compiler that reads WiX authoring and writes .wixobj – WiX object – files. Light.exe is the WiX linker that combines .wixobj (and other) files into an MSI package (or a merge module or a bundle). Lit.exe combines multiple .wixobj files into a .wixlib (WiX library). If you’ve written C or C++ code (and compiled it by hand), you’ve seen this model in action....
Fifteen years of WiX
Fifteen and a bit years ago, I was a release engineering technical lead, responsible for the build and setup for a number of products. We used a commercial installer development tool for creating our MSI packages – of course we did, because there was no other choice. Licenses were expensive so were paid for and used by only the release engineering team. But we had development teams that wanted to avoid involving their release engineer for simple changes to their installers....
WiX v3.14: Details about WiX pi
Over five years ago, I announced the new plan for WiX v3.x. I was quite the prophet—I predicted ongoing WiX v3.x releases: As long as there are interested users and willing contributors, we’ll release WiX v3.8, v3.9, v3.10, and so forth. We went beyond that to WiX v3.11 and multiple point releases each for WiX v3.10 and v3.11. My favorite bit of prophecy, however, is: (My personal hope is that we have reason to ship WiX v3....
MSIX: Slightly more detail about what might be something huge but probably won't be
Over on his blog, Rob wrote about his guesses for what the still-somewhat-mysterious MSIX means for Windows deployment. We got some details at the Build conference last week. The two most-detailful were MSIX: Inside and Out Accelerating Windows 10 enterprise app deployment with MSIX Here are my key takeaways from these presentations. MSIX: One package format to rule them all Appx packages today are Open Packaging Conventions Zip files with a manifest....
WiX v3.10.4 and WiX v3.11.1 released
Today, as we bid an indifferent farewell to the 12-month period known as 2017, we shipped WiX v3.10.4 and WiX v3.11.1 to mitigate a vulnerability in Burn. The vulnerability is a little tougher to exploit than the one fixed in WiX v3.10.2; this one requires already-running malicious code that’s specially-crafted to look for bundles that are running with elevated privileges. As always, we recommend updating to the latest and greatest as soon as possible....
Proposed platform support in WiX v4.0
Update: See the meeting highlights at FireGiant for the video of the discussion. Given that WiX v4.0 is a major-version release and will have a number of significant changes in the build environment, it’s a great opportunity to think about which versions of Visual Studio and .NET we should support. We’ve kept compatibility high in mind during WiX v3.x but it’s been eight (!) years since WiX v3.0 shipped. (Eight?! Really?...
Labeling issues in WiX
During our last WiX Online Meeting, I talked myself into volunteering to study how other projects use labels in their issues. Here’s what I came up with: Some repos prefix their labels to sort them into “namespaces,” like resolution and area. Generally prefixes are common in repos with many dozens of labels. WiX doesn’t have that many issue labels so I propose that we don’t need them. Instead, we should just document the labels we use....
WiX v3.11 released
On Cinco de Mayo 2017, we released WiX v3.11. WiX v3.11 RTM is v3.11.0.1701. You can download the WiX Toolset v3.11 build tools and Visual Studio extensions here. The primary goal of the WiX v3.11 development cycle was to support Visual Studio 2017. We met that goal, with more than the usual number of challenges, due to the scope of changes in Visual Studio 2017. In previous versions of WiX v3....