Doctor Deploys Blog

Below you will see an empty box. That is not a mistake. Robert suggested I have a picture of a blue pill there: You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

Well, the story isn’t quite over but we do have zero bugs filed against the WiX toolset for v3.0 now. As noted in previous weeks, we were working towards a lockdown date of the 28th that would punt all bugs that did not block key scenarios to WiX v3.5 or 4.0. Last night was Votive’s last night for bugs and the remaining Visual Studio 2005 specific issues were all punted.

Now the Visual Studio test team has offered to do a full test pass over all the key scenarios to help ensure that we haven’t regressed anything in the last few weeks. We’ll let the whole toolset bake for the month of June. Assuming we don’t find anything that causes us to modify any code then we release the final build of WiX v3.0 on July 4th.

So if you don’t hear me talking about WiX v3.0 over the next few months that means all is well. What am I going to talk about instead? Not much. I’m busy writing code for WiX v3.5 and I’ll talk more about that when it does something useful (right now it’s just a bunch of code).

In the meantime, keep coding. You know I am.

Original post by Rob Mensching

I created the @wixtoolset Twitter account late last year. The account sat mostly dormant until two weeks ago when I started experimenting with posting to Twitter (tweeting?)from the command-line. After a couple tests, I integrated the experiment into the WiX toolset build process so every build makes a status update to the account. You can see an example here.

Peter noticed the changes while he was in South Korea and asked what was up with Twitter. Joe, who graciously monitors our weekly build process came back with an amusing answer:

Something Rob setup, I think. The obvious, but trivial, answer is to “tweet�.

I’m not a twitterer so I don’t know what we’ve been saying. But, from a clandestine look, we’ve only been sending build notifications on it … the account itself is tracking Rob like a bloodhound and Bob like a lazy guy watching a dude in an airport terminal go about his business. Which is to say, Bob had something like 2 comments in the last week or so, Rob had a dozen.

The truth is I’m just experimenting with additional ways to get the news out about new WiX toolset builds. The more people that install the latest builds the better the toolset becomes. So, subscribe to the WiX toolset feed or follow the @wixtoolset Twitter account whichever works best for you. But please do upgrade regularly to help us improve the WiX toolset.

Original post by Rob Mensching

It was six weeks ago that a full blue moon graced my bug charts for the first time. Tonight it happened again but with half of the bugs. That right, tonight we hit 5 bugs and all of them are open against Votive.

Eric did a fantastic job running down all the remaining MSBuild bugs and coming up with solutions (some quite creative) to resolve them all. That effort is why we are down to only a few Votive bugs. Eric has been a huge help picking up MSBuild, just like Brian picked up heat.

Also this afternoon Bob, Candy and I punted to WiX v4 the first bug I really wanted to fix. That process deserves a blog entry of its own but suffice it to say that we are serious about reducing churn in the project and shipping WiX v3.0. In fact, next week whatever bugs that are not fixed are probably punted. In the case of Votive for VS2005 bugs, we’ll probably just close them since we’re not planning to do any future work on Votive for VS2005 in the future. WiX v3.5 will focus on VS2010 and VS2008 support.

So next week, either this chart will be empty or we’ll be slipping the WiX v3.0 final build date. You know what outcome I’m hoping for. <smile/>

Original post by Rob Mensching

Original post by Petermarcu

Pretty quiet night tonight fixing bugs on the WiX toolset. That was pretty much expected since there aren’t many bugs left. No Votive progress since Justin and Jason were both out. Eric took out one MSBuild bug and is trying to devise a solution to the single remaining bug. Basically, we’re right where we were last week in the bug count.

On the side, Mike killed a bug in the XML CustomAction that was reported by email. Brian also added the ability for heat to load extensions that aren’t referenced in the heat.exe.config file. That’ll make it much easier for others to extend heat after WiX v3 ships.

At this point, we’re only going to be fixing bugs in Votive and MSBuild for two more weeks. The rest of the WiX toolset is locked down and we’ll only take crash or corruption bugs. Everything will be in escrow for June. Things are going well and I’m very excited that we’ll soon be able to focus fully on WiX v3.5.

Original post by Rob Mensching

Tonight was another good night for the WiX toolset. We’re down one more bug from last week leaving us with 6 bugs. Earlier this week, Mike and I tracked down a really nasty memory corruption bug in the IIS CustomAction that was actually manifesting as a crash in the SecureObjects CustomAction (brutal to track down). A number of MSBuild issues popped up this week and were dealt with promptly. Also, Brian was able to get us back down to zero heat bugs. Very nice.

In any case, our glide path is looking really nice. I’d love to see the last MSBuild bug disappear because that will just leave us with four VS2005 bugs (which are mostly looking like limitations in VS) and an annoying performance issue. In other words, nothing horrible and only in Votive. Everything is locking down well. I’m quite happy with our progress.

That also means you should expect to see us punting most bugs to WiX v4 in the coming weeks. If it doesn’t crash or corrupt data, we’re probably not fixing it in WiX v3 any more.

Original post by Rob Mensching

I have to admit, this week I was worried that we weren’t going to be able to meet last week’s bug count for the WiX toolset. Mike was out on holiday and we were starting with 3 extension bugs. Eric was also out so we probably weren’t going to take care of the last MSBuild bug. Fortunately, Jason was able to kill off all the DTF bugs (again) and pulled off an amazing feat of profiling to nuke a Votive bug. Fredrik took care of the COM+ extension issue and I got the other two extension bugs plus the candle bug. Brian took one heat bug and one dark bug.

The end result is 7 bugs this week, one down from last week. Fantastically better than I feared when I woke up this morning. Hopefully, next week we’ll have a full crew on deck and push the count down even further.

One thing that will be helping us push the bug count down is that we’re going to start ratcheting up the bar on bugs. So, unless really bad stuff happens (like crash or data corruption), we will be punting bugs out of the core toolset now. Votive, MSBuild, extensions and heat bugs are still fair game though. So we’re not done but one week closer.

Original post by Rob Mensching