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WiX v3.5 supports Visual Studio 2010 beta 2

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So that the WiX Working Group can enjoy Hallowe’en on Saturday, WiX v3.5.1030.0 with support for Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 was released today. You can get the bits at http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.5.1030.0/. This isn’t a full beta release – Burn is still in active development and isn’t ready for prime-time use yet – but we want to support everyone using the beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2010, which shipped last week.

Candy, Visual Studio program manager and WiX Working Group babysitter/cat-herder, had this to say about the features in this release:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta shipped on 10/21. With the team’s hard work and agility, we were able to release the WiX support on VS2010 Beta 2 today! Here are some highlights for this release:

  • Extension Manager Integration – Now you can download and install WiX directly from within the VS IDE by launching Extension Manager
  • Major performance improvement during project building – No more IDE freezing during build
  • Automatic upgrade from VS2008 to VS2010 – no more manual editing of wixproj files to change the tools version
  • Improved IDE experience including drag/drop of nodes, copy/paste of items, and project references
  • Added Visual Studio 2010 Express products detection in the WiX VS Extension – New in Beta
  • Over 40 + bug fixes

I’m pleased we were able to get a release supporting beta 2 out so quickly and I’m very excited about the “no more IDE freezing during build” improvement. There are several other smaller enhancements that will make WiX v3.5 a no-brainer upgrade when it ships next year.

In the meantime, if you’re using Visual Studio 2010, please grab this build and be on the lookout for future weekly releases. Problems, questions? Send mail to wix-users, file bug reports, or submit feature requests.