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WiX v3.0 beta coming soon

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As Rob announced, a beta release of WiX v3.0 is coming soon, probably on Friday, 5-December. We had a dress rehearsal last Thursday at WiX night, complete with my pushing the build up to the WiX SourceForge.net releases page.

The beta release is our stake in the ground: We’ve implemented the features we plan to implement for this version and our set of known bugs is small, getting smaller, and not blocking general use of the product. We’ll ask everyone to upgrade to this release and report back difficulties:

  • If you’re using the stable release of WiX v2, did WixCop correctly update your authoring to the WiX v3 schema?
  • If you’re using an earlier build of WiX v3, did upgrading to the beta release require any updates to your authoring or MSBuild projects or other build scripts?
  • Did you update your authoring to take advantage of WiX v3 features? Which ones?

We’ll continue publishing weekly builds and will probably also publish other release candidates before we declare WiX v3.0 “fully baked.”

Past and future

A while back, Rob and I discussed some ideas for shipping WiX v3.0 and Burn, the WiX chainer we’d been working on. Rob asked for feedback on changes to the WiX roadmap and the results were almost unanimous. Though it’s painful to postpone, even briefly, the chainer that Fredrik, Rob, and I have made great progress on, finishing WiX v3.0 now has too many advantages:

  • It gets WiX v3.0 in the hands of users who’d rather use “official releases” of WiX.
  • It lets us deliver ahead of schedule the final bits to the Visual Studio team shipping WiX.
  • It lets us focus on Burn with a solid WiX foundation beneath us.

So that’s what we’re doing and why we’re shipping a WiX v3.0 beta now. We hope to get everyone who uses WiX to try the beta release and give us feedback and bug reports. We’ll continue fixing bugs and shipping weekly builds to keep the conversation going.

Over the next several months, I hope we’ll be able to go from full-time bug fixing to part-time bug fixing and part-time Burn development for the next release of WiX.