Wix 3.0.5419 has been promoted to Production Stable quality on SourceForge.net and can be downloaded here.
I've been fairly critical of WiX over the years but today marks a turning point in that believe. With the release of 3.0, many features are now in place that begin to make a really strong case for seriously considering the use of WiX over legacy tools. While WiX still lacks a 1st class bootstrapper/chainer and proper IDE GUI design tools that other tools have, I believe that the core foundation of WiX is much better positioned for the future.
Hopefully we'll see WiX 3.5 ( featuring Burn )in 6-12 months to address these concerns. I also hope to see Votive explode into a fully featured visual studio add-in. Finally, I expect a market of WiX based designer tools to appear. Hopefully WiXAware 3.0 will be released ( and even more hopefully that it actually work! ) and I also anticipate InstallShield will eventually bring tools to market based on WiX. IMO it is inevitable and the InstallShield brand as a packaging tool will not survive if they do not.
So there it is: WiX 3.0 is shipped and I now see the road that I will travel towards over the coming months. With dozens of installers composed from hundreds of merge modules and tens of thousands of files, it'll take us awhile to get there from sure. But I am no convinced that the effort will be worthwhile.
Historical archive 2003-2011
2 comments:
In testing, we have seen that there is a noticible decrease in performance when running light.exe 3.0 over light.exe 2.0. Have you heard of any of these issues? Do you know of any perfomance tweaks that can be made?
I left the comment about light.exe 3.0 being slow. I did some more research and found that if I pass the -sval switch to supress MSI validate, it cut the time by 75%.
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