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when setup isn't just xcopy

WiX v3.5 <3's Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Never before today had I considered adding support for emoticons to my blog engine but this blog post almost screams for it. You should read the title as "WiX v3.5 hearts VS2010 Beta 2". Yep, our friends in Visual Studio delivered fix after fix in Votive to ensure that the WiX toolset now supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta2.

Candy is a Program Manager on Visual Studio who was also instrumental in our WiX v3.0 releases (in case you didn't remember). She sent this status around internally today that I thought should get a lot more publicity:

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 extremely happy to see the "No more IDE freezing during build" feature but there is a bug fix that I'm actually happier to have fixed. The WiX toolset can now run on and read .NET Framework 4.0 assemblies. That was a late bug Jordan and Mohamed (both Visual Studio Developers in Test) caught and Svet (Visual Studio Developer Lead) got the fix in last night.

So, the Votive half of WiX v3.5 is going well. Now, I just need to get the other half of WiX v3.5, Burn, caught up. In the meantime, check out the latest WiX toolset build on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

 

Hi. The less-than sign from the title is currently appearing unescaped in the RSS feed. Therefore, the feed does not validate as well-formed XML. Please correct this problem in the blog engine. Thank you very much.

PS: First, I included the 'title' tag from the feed to illustrate the problem. But when I sent the comment, I received an "error trying to process the request". Is the blog engine processing HTML or XML markup in comments? If so, did it fail when encountered the malformed code?

Indeed. Thanks for pointing that out. It is interesting that all of the RSS readers I was using didn't complain about this. Fix seems to be working now.

Also, it is ASP.NET XSS validation that is catching the angle brackets and throwing the comments out. Addressing that issue is on my todo list. I just haven't sat down to write the feature.

What are the licensing details for Votive? It was detailed on the WiX home page.
Thank-you

Karen, Votive is released as part of the WiX toolset so it is released under the same license.

Hi Rob,

First of all thank you and all team members for WIX, it is the best MSI related tool which I used!!!

And I saw in another your blog post that there are two key features in WiX v3.5: Burn and VS2010 support. And I wonder do you have on list of the features for WiX 3.5 feature to rescan .wix files for automatic builds (like extracting registry information, adding automatically files based wildcard)? Something like Heat, but for daily build.

Thank you!!!

"Added Visual Studio 2010 Express products detection in the WiX VS Extension – New in Beta"

Does this mean WiX 3.5 Votive VS integration will now be available to Express Editions as well?

@bhitalks, unfortunately, no. The VS Express Editions do not support Visual Studio Integration Packages like Votive.