A name, or if you prefer identity, is a profoundly important concept in pretty much everything. In software deployment identities serve as the foundation for versioning and dependencies which are pretty much everything for us. In ancient Egyptian mythology, Isis was granted power over the all powerful sun god, Ra, when he told her his true name. Ra gave Isis a bunch of other names before his true name which is similar to a problem we have in software deployment. How do you get the true identify of software? Well, ISO/IEC 19770-2 wants to be the solution and today's release of the WiX toolset makes supporting that standard trivial.

My interview with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell at .NET Rocks went up yesterday. Like all interviews or public speaking gigs, I had some butterflies before the show. But when Carl Skype'd me the world just floated away and I on! The whole interview was tons of fun but there were a couple things that I thought went particularly well.

I didn't plan to start my discussion about the new installation technology in Windows 8, AppX, with this topic. However, a quick scan through this morning's email from wix-users prompted me to start here.

I joined the Developer Division almost 2 years ago. When I announced the move I spoke about my new focus on the short and long term of setup on Windows. In the Windows 8 keynote and the Developer Preview bits available now you can see the results of both. It all starts in the keynote when Antoine Leblond comes on stage and fires up Visual Studio.