RobMensching.com LLC
Since it's launch in 2004, the WiX toolset has been completely hosted on SourceForge.net. SourceForge is fine but feels a bit clunky and a little behind the times. About a year ago I started looking at alternatives since open source hosting platforms are now a dime a dozen. In the end, I didn't find a single platform that offered everything I wanted. However, CodePlex provides Mercurial and a much better file release system than SourceForge so I decided to use those for WiX. For now bugs and the mailing list do not move (I'm still looking).
In the coming months, you'll see me putting more of an emphasis on http://wixtoolset.org as the central place to get WiX toolset information. SourceForge is kind enough to host content but its all on Linux servers. I prefer to write code in C# with ASP.NET MVC so I recently moved http://wixtoolset.org to Windows based hosting. In between working on Burn, I'll be building a site there with more advanced functionality than a bunch of static pages like we have today.
Finally, I want to mention how helpful and responsive the CodePlex team was for me. Their willingness to work with me to get http://wix.codeplex.com set up just right was a major factor in my decision move our source control and file releases there.
Now on with WiX v3.5!
11 Comments
Comment by dB. on Tuesday, June 08, 2010 9:05 AM
Does this mean that wix commits will go into the public repository first (ie. this is not a sync from internal MSFT -> codeplex)?
Comment by Rob Mensching on Tuesday, June 08, 2010 9:12 PM
Comment by Kalev on Wednesday, June 09, 2010 3:18 AM
After all, Mercurial is a distributed version control system and is meant for exactly that kind of offline operation -- you work on the code for a week, commiting every changeset. And then you can publish the changesets when you feel you are ready.
The way CVS worked was that you were forced to publish everything in one big hunk, which made lots of people not like that.
Comment by Immo Landwerth on Wednesday, June 09, 2010 8:17 AM
great news. CodePlex offers bug tracking powered by TFS work item tracking (WIT), which is similar to PS. I think it would be strange to publish the source code on CodePlex but using something completely different for bug tracking. Are there any specific reasons your are not satisfied with WIT?
All the best,
Immo
Comment by Christopher Painter on Wednesday, June 09, 2010 2:15 PM
BTW, where are the WiX v3/v2 sources these days? They are removed from SourceForge and not published on CodePlex. Are you supposed to pull by changeset now and no longer have the sources.zips?
Comment by Ran Davidovitz on Sunday, June 13, 2010 12:10 PM
Also nice that you added the tags for the two previous versions
Comment by Hesham Desouky on Monday, June 14, 2010 2:21 AM
What I missing with the tool (and even the contribution) is WiX GUI element editor add-in (for VS 2005).
I know sharpdevelop is providing one, but the add-in will be a great tool.
I can contribute in such a tool but don't have enough time to start the project
Comment by Christopher Painter on Tuesday, June 15, 2010 7:23 PM
Checkout IsWiX on Codeplex and let me know what you think. I tried to organize it to work with WiX but not reinvent any WiX and also be loosely coupled so different people could work on different designers.
Chris
Comment by Nick on Thursday, July 01, 2010 7:23 AM
Now, the only thing resembling a weekly build is here http://wix.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets. I downloaded something called wix-b3707e25c582.zip, which was the only thing with a recent release date. But no binaries!
Am I missing something?
Comment by Craig Morrison on Thursday, July 01, 2010 9:36 PM
Great to see WiX migrated to CodePlex. However the documentation manuals seem to be lost in the ether somewhere between SourceForge and CodePlex. Any chance you can upload them to CodePlex sometime soon?
Craig
Comment by Randy on Friday, July 08, 2011 6:56 PM