What is a great installer?
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It's very much alive, but it has an odd relationship with Microsoft. The main developers are Microsoft staff, but developing WiX is not their full-time job - they're referred to as a 'virtual team'. Rob Mensching, the 'benevolent dictator', works on Windows Marketplace as his primary role. Because it started as an internal Microsoft tool, Microsoft retain overall copyright. To prevent Microsoft from being held to ransom over copyright in contributions, any third-party submissions have to officially sign over copyright in their contribution to Microsoft, and this process (from what I see on the wix-users mailing list) takes an exceedingly long time. The combination of using Microsoft employees' free time and lack of third-party contributions generally makes the pace of development pretty slow. In addition, WiX v2 has now been used to produce setups for Office 2007, SQL Server 2005 and Exchange Server 2007. VS 2008 is reportedly using WiX v3. That's how it's been until recently. Rob mentioned a couple of days ago that a future version of Visual Studio Team System will include WiX support and that they've staffed a small team to improve it.
DoEvents
: Generating unexpected recursion since 1991Interesting, that's the general idea that I had too, but fun to read what's happening behind the scenes. :-)
Wout