In military science, force multiplication or a force multiplier is a factor or a combination of factors that gives personnel or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater feats than without it. In open-source software support, force multipliers are the details that prevent duplication of effort between the people with questions and the people with answers. From someone who is more often than not in the latter group—though not exclusively, I must sadly assure you—I absolutely love when I get a support ticket that has a detailed description, a full set of bundle logs, and code....
WiX v5 and entitlement
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....