My approach has been to separate the prerequisites bootstrapper (which still probably needs to be C++) from the chainer, which I am currently building in C#.
Prerequisites work well data-driven, because almost everything can be described as a registry item search, product code, service name, etc, and a location to install from if it's a redistributable on the CD. As a chainer I have a C# program that processes forms (or objects) defined in an Xml file, together with descriptions of features and their owning MSI files. The chainer uses reflection to locate, load and (in the case of Windows Forms) show each form, which has a standard template with Next, Back, Cancel. These Windows Forms replace the UI in the multiple MSI files. If you want a custom form or piece of code, write and refer to it in the Xml and it'll get loaded and shown. Reflection makes this straightforward. The result is that you get one UI that's easy to build (it's Windows forms), a feature tree that can be virtual (they just have to map to actual features in multiple MSI files), and one progress bar across multiple MSI files. When I get more into 4.5 these will be one transaction. My point is basically that separating the bootstrapper from the chainer lets you do your favorite C#, as long as you can require the .NET framework and the flow from prerequisites into wizard-type UI looks seamless. Phil Wilson From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Christopher Painter Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 6:28 PM To: Rob Mensching; dB.; Daniel Hughes; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date I've often thought about creating and marketing my own bootstrapper product. I know the stories and requirements inside out as I've done serviced product lines with vastly more complex prereq requirements then vs and office. The problem is I could only write in in C# as my C++ skills suck. WiX is a lot close to mass adoption then even Rob knows. A solid bootstrapper and a full featured designer exposing the majority of WiX capabilities along with a sprinkling of custom actions would work miracles in terms of adoption. Rob Mensching <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Fair. Of course, I don't think we should be looking to take over the world with the WiX toolset (we probably need more people answering questions and improving the overall documentation before getting thousands and thousands more users ) but I'm always open to suggestions about what we should do. What do other people think about purely fixing the bugs in the WiX toolset and adding no more functionality? That means there will be no bootstrapper in WiX v3 and no improvement to the IIS CustomActions to better handle IIS7. Basically, imagine the WiX v3 toolset functionality of today plus fixing ~150 bugs. Thoughts? -----Original Message----- From: dB. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 12:44 To: Rob Mensching; Daniel Hughes; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: RE: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date Rob, I think you completely nailed it when you say "We could cut the bootstrapper (again) to focus solely on bugs and probably "finish" WiX v3 sooner but I believe the bootstrapper is more important than that." This is a typical dilemma of any software project. If Wix cost 100$ you could make 100'000$ by the end of the year if you were to ship in October. Or you could delay that revenue into 2009 with the risk of losing market share (people using InstallShield, etc.). I fought several arguments where people were trying to use wix 2.0 + very nasty custom actions vs. wix 3.0 with built-in extensions just because wix 3.0 hasn't shipped yet. I bet many people are having similar arguments in the real world. cheers -dB. -----Original Message----- From: Rob Mensching [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 2:22 PM To: dB.; Daniel Hughes; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: RE: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date Interesting. Let's go back and look at the things that are driving the WiX v3 release. 1. Bugs. WiX v2 was marked "stable" by pushing a number of bugs to WiX v3 (especially Votive bugs). There are still a lot of bugs open that need to be fixed. I do not just want to push a bunch of WiX v2 bugs to WiX v4. 2. Patching. Patching is hard with MSI and the new tools in WiX v3 can help a lot. Those tools are basically done and we're just running down the bug tail now. 3. Votive. Votive was *very* rough in WiX v2. It had years to go before it was going to truly useable. In WiX v3, Justin and a lot of help from members of the VS team have made Votive far more usable. There are still a lot of bugs to fix and the only reason I think it can be done this year is because of the VS help. Otherwise, I'm quite certain we'd *still* have a very crippled VS story. 4. Bootstrapper. Every other day or so there is another request for chaining/bootstrapping. Some of the solutions out there meet some people's needs but IMHO none of them have all of the features that are needed to meet the majority of bootstrapping needs. This part of the WiX toolset is about 2 years late and I think it is a big mistake to go into 2009 without a useable bootstrap story. 5. DTF. After finally deciding that the MSI team was not going to do it, I asked Jason Ginchereau if he would like to add DTF to WiX v3. This codebase was pretty stable so my expectation was that this wouldn't affect our bug count much. Now let's talk about who's doing all of this work. I'm driving the bug count overall with help from the area owners. Peter Marcu (http://blogs.msdn.com/pmarcu) is driving the patching support backed up by Heath Stewart (http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths). Votive is lead by Justin Rockwood (http://blogs.msdn.com/jrock/) and Jason Ginchereau (http://blogs.msdn.com/jasongin)'s team from VS. The bootstrapper code base is being developed by Fredrik Grohn (http://fredrikgrohn.com) and hopefully will be added to WiX soon. DTF is, of course, Jason's baby. Bob Arnson (http://www.joyofsetup.com) basically helps out everywhere. With the exception of the VS team I would guess that each of those people donate about 10 hours per week to the toolset. There are others but that is the bulk of regular development happening on the WiX toolset. The sheer number of hours available to address bugs is why I think it will take until the end of the year. We could cut the bootstrapper (again) to focus solely on bugs and probably "finish" WiX v3 sooner but I believe the bootstrapper is more important than that. Plus, this is a volunteer project so it is hard to expect everyone to stay excited about solely fixing bugs for 6+ months. You should look at what parts of the WiX toolset you depend one when judging stability. If you just want the core toolset (candle, light) then that code base is very stable in v3. Arguably it is more stable than it was in WiX v2 (certainly more bug fixes). Granted v3 can change from build to build so you might pick up a bug but we fix core toolset regressions very, very quickly. As for Votive, I don't think you can compare the stability differences from v2 to v3. V3 is so much more feature rich and useful. That said, there is a lot of effort going into Votive right now and there have been some nasty bugs with VS2005 integration lately. Patching (pyro, torch)... those tools are quite stable but new so you might find new things. DTF, has been around for a long time and the bug fixes seem to reflect that. Ultimately, I believe that "stability" in the WiX toolset is measured by the number of changes going into the codebase. WiX v2 has no development so it is *extremely* stable. WiX v3 is quite functional but there are bug fixes going in so we have to "reserve the right" to accidentally break stuff that works. Pick you risk profile and go from there. -----Original Message----- From: dB. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:17 To: Rob Mensching; Daniel Hughes; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: RE: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date I understand this approach, but it's very Microsoft-Windows-like: a project that lasts years. I am fine using wix in its beta form, but that's because I am both management and development. Had I been only management, I wouldn't have made this call. My 0.02c is that it would greatly benefit wix adoption to stabilize on a more limited feature set and release 3.0 in 2008. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob Mensching Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 12:49 PM To: Daniel Hughes; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date 1. The "SourceForge drops" weren't any different than the weekly releases. Since there is a fair bit of overhead in getting the drops on to the SourceForge releases page, the cost to benefit ratio wasn't working out. 2. We could do a drop to the "releases page" but it really wouldn't be any different than a "weekly release". Instead, I've been considering "releasing" a web page that points at the weekly releases to make it clearer where to get WiX v3 drops. 3. I expect WiX v3 will come out of beta sometime mid-next year. My hope is to get all of the major features and the majority of the bug back log taken care of by the end of this year and then just bake for 9 or so months. 4. I have an old blog post that talks about what WiX v3 is about (http://robmensching.com/blog/archive/2007/04/10/WiX-v3-Roadmap-Draft.as px). The ClickThrough features on that roadmap are probably not going to make it since we have a larger bug count than anticipated. Also, IIS7 is turning out to be a pain point that I believe we're going to have to find some way to tackle. Plenty of work to be done before the end of the year. 5. To be clear, we're focused on working towards completing WiX v3 right now, not stabilizing it. "Completing" means we're fixing every bug and getting features checked in. "Stabilizing" means punting bugs and definitely not adding features. We spent about a year "stabilizing" WiX v2 before a lot of people suggested that it was done. I'm hoping we move a bit faster through stabilizing WiX v3 since the VS team has donated a few extra resources. 6. Note: we had someone during the WiX v2 timeframe that took the effort to pick "high quality" v2 builds and push them out to SourceForge. If you wanted to start managing that type of process for WiX v3, feel free to contact me and we can talk about it. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Daniel Hughes Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 18:43 To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [WiX-users] WIX 3.0 release date Hi, I have noticed that WIX 3.0 has been a beta for a long time. The current source forge drop is now over a year old 2007-05-25 09:31, Thats a long time people.... that drop didn't even work with VS2008 I know you can get the weekly builds but those of us who want to use WIX 3.0 in our products require something a little more proven then a weekly release..... So when is WIX 3.0 coming out of BETA.... and when do we get at least another sourceforge drop... Is their some kind of roadmap.... or at least some kind of estimate for the release date... What about a list of stuff which needs doing before the release....? Cheers, Daniel ======================================================================= This email, including any attachments, is only for the intended addressee. It is subject to copyright, is confidential and may be the subject of legal or other privilege, none of which is waived or lost by reason of this transmission. If the receiver is not the intended addressee, please accept our apologies, notify us by return, delete all copies and perform no other act on the email. Unfortunately, we cannot warrant that the email has not been altered or corrupted during transmission. ======================================================================= ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users Christopher Painter, Author of Deployment Engineering Blog Have a hot tip, know a secret or read a really good thread that deserves attention? E-Mail Me ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. 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