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Thursday, November 20, 2014

IsWiX 2.5.14324.3 Released

When IsWiX was first developed, we targeted Visual Studio 2008.  I dove into VS extensibility trying to figure out how to get the addin story to work.  I got it to work but the solution left a little bit to desire.  The first problem was very embarrassing:  the icon was a big smiley face.

The API / method that registered the addin with the menu supported 2 techniques. One was an orginal index from a Microsoft Office icon library and the second involved creating a resources dll.  I didn't have the skill or the time to go down the second road so I stuck with the smiley face telling myself that I'd go back and fix it.  As the days, weeks, months, years went by I failed to do so.

The second problem was that occasionally Visual Studio would just decide to drop the addin from the menu.  You had to run a devenv /resetaddin command to get it back.

Today a new version of IsWiX is released that solves these problems.  I've scoped the "old" addin to VS 2008, 2010 and 2012 and created a "new" addin using VSIX extension that targets VS 2013 and 2015.  This new extension registers IsWiX in Help | About and Tools | Packages and Extensions and gives a nice blue flame icon with the new text "Launch IsWiX" under the tools menu. 

That's right, IsWiX now supports VS2015!  There is a caveat though.  The IsWiX multiproject solution templates ride on top of WiX infrastructure.  WiX as of v3.9 does not yet support VS2015 so although IsWiX has correctly registered with VS2015 the project templates will not show up until WiX is ready to support VS2015.    We are way ahead of the curve though so I expect all of this will come together prior to VS2015 shipping next year.

I'm sorry for letting the yellow icon live for so long and for doing back to back weekly releases.  I finally get a fired up on this issue making it now or never.

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