Changing Domains

The ISWIX blog has moved to http://www.iswix.com/blog. All 379 previous articles from 2003 - 2017 will remain at this URL to make sure the content can be linked to from all over the web.

Christopher Painter's email address is also changing to chrpai@iswix.com.

Sincerely,

Christopher Painter
ISWIX, LLC.

IsWiX Visual Studio 2017 Support Roadmap

I just wanted to put an FYI out there that IsWiX will not support Visual Studio 2017 at launch date.  Microsoft has made substantial changes to the way VS is deployed and created a lot of complications for extension developers.  

In order for IsWiX to function in VS 2 extensions need to be installed:

WiX Votive
IsWiX AddIn


The WiX votive is required to load .wixproj based projects in your solution and is the foundation for IsWiX's own multiproject solution templates.

The IsWiX AddIn is required to send a .wxs document to the IsWiX.exe.

WiX appears to be moving in the direction of removing Votive from their installer and shipping it separately via the VS marketplace.    Assuming the work is completed (there is currently no ship date announced for v3.11.0)  it will likely require the setup developer to do an additional installation step prior to being able to load an existing solution or create a new one.

As sub optimal as this is, it appears to be set in stone and I have no intention of spending any energy on IsWiX until  I see the final landscape of what I have to deal with.  I will likely do something similar to what they are doing or I might make a bootstrapper  to automate installing WiX, the votive extension and the IsWiX AddIn extension.

FWIW, while this has been the worst, ever release of VS has caused pain for me as either a user of WiX or a user of InstallShield.  It just takes time for this to catch up.   For this reason I *ALWAYS* recommend keeping your application projects in one solution and your installer projects in another.  This way you can ensure you won't be blocking your application developers from moving forward to the latest version of VS while you continue to compile against the tried and true version you've always used.     They need to be cutting edge,  we do not need to be.

IsWiX 4.0.17001.1

Happy New Year!

 

I've published a new version of IsWiX with a pretty important (to me and a few of my customers) bug fix.  I actually did the work yesterday and couldn't decide if I wanted it to be the only release of 2016 or the first release of 2017.  Silly, I know...  that and the evenings festivities were calling.

 

Anyways let's talk about the fix.  The files and folder designer code is a bit scary.  I didn't write it and I appreciate the efforts of the person that did.  That said,  it had a pretty bad performance issue.  Most people only put a handful of directories and files in any given merge module so most people would have never seen it.    However if you are working on website and find yourself dealing with 1000 directories and 10,000 files in a single merge module it suddenly becomes quiet unusable.

 

But first a back story....

 

Many people probably don't know that IsWiX had a design goal of creating sorted documents with deterministically unique (predictable)  Id attributes and GUIDs.   The reason for this was the company I worked at did *A LOT* of branching and merging and we wanted to make it as easy as possible to branch and merge IsWiX generated .WXS files.  

 

So every time Files and Folders updates it's model it resorts the XML.  This usually isn't a problem. However on really large documents it can take 5-10 seconds depending on machine performance.  When doing a drag and drop the process would go something like this.    Write the XML for a directory, sort,  process subfolders recursively.   So if you dragged a folder with say a 1000 subfolders you would see it get visibly slower and slower until it bogged down so bad you walked away hoping it would finish or just terminated the process.

 

I've done a simple fix remove the sort step and do a final sort at the end.  Now you see it update all the directories in the UI very quickly,  a 5-10 second wait as it does the sort and done.   If your documents aren't that large  you probably won't notice a difference at all.

 

You can get the new release here.

 

PS- It seems certain browsers have been complaining about anything downloaded from CodePlex. That really sucks.  IsWiX (and the WiX Toolset) is as safe as always.  If you have problems downloading just use a different browser.  If you still get issues be sure to "unblock" the file before installing.

 

AppX for Native Apps Thoughts

Five years ago, I wrote two blog posts where I explored the possibilities of AppX:


AppX Just Might Work


AppX Just Might Fail


I don't work in Redmond or Schaumburg Itasca so I tend to not get caught up in the hype of new technologies and instead focus on what works for my customers TODAY.   Over the next few years Windows RT came (and went)  and the Windows Store continued to be pretty much irrelevant.  About a year ago there was some chatter of a Project-C.  I continued to have that "meh" feeling.


The a few months ago I read about some work that the Windows Nano team was doing to support installing per-machine  native apps using extensions for AppX.  Additionally the FireGiant team was developing an extension to support creating MSI and AppX from a single source code base.   Now I found this  REALLY interesting except that I don't have any apps to deploy to Windows Nano Server.


Along comes BUILD2016 and FireGiant is now posting about creating MSI for Windows 8.1 and below and AppX for Windows 10  DESKTOP applications.  Flexera is also sending similar messages.   Ok, I'm really interested now. 


So it seems now some five years later that AppX just might work!


I am wondering what FireGiant will charge for this capability though.  It's kind of sad to not see it in the core WiX Toolset as open source goodness.  Rob and Bob, like the rest of us, do have mortgages to pay after all. Maybe there will be options similiar to Visual Studio Community Edition for small business, open source and educational uses.


Slightly off topic I'd like to tie this into another possibly over hyped technology: Chocolatey


I want to like chocolatey. I really do.  I also want to like One-Get Package Management.  However the former is just a wrapper for installers of various quality  and the latter was never really finished and updated to support the latest chocolatey client.


Before anyone gets too offended... I'm not discarding chocolatey yet.  I'm wondering allowed... what if in a few years time everyone is on Windows 10  (Microsoft is pushing it hard after all),  most Choco packages are really AppX wrappers and Packge Management has excellent chocolatey support.


While I'm dreaming... What if we had a way of white listing choco packages in SCCM Software Center?   Oh the possibilities.


So in closing, while new and "modern" (oh I dislike that term)  usually disappoints me, I'm seeing reason to be optimistic today.   There could be a sea change coming to my world view soon.

IsWiX4.0.15284.1 Released

A month ago I announced a new version of IsWiX with support for WiX v4.0.  At the time I wrote the warning:

I tested all of the designers but there is a chance that one of my refactoring's, well, sucked.  I'm sorry, I don't have unit tests to know for sure.  If you find a bug, please report it and revert to IsWiX 3.0.  I will follow up with an IsWiX 4.0 fix in a matter of days possibly hours.

Sure enough, one of my updates did, cough, "suck".  It seems I didn't test all of my designers, rather only the ones that appeared.  I missed the fact that one of them wasn't showing until I needed it to do some work for a client.  I opened up IsWiX and went to define a custom table and was really disappointed that it wasn't there.  So I followed my own advice and downgraded to IsWiX 3.0, kept calm and carried on.  Eventually I had some time to go look at it and sure enough the IsValidContext() member simply needed to be refactored.  

The new and improved IsWiX can be found here.

IsWiX4.0.15247.1 Released

In the past few weeks I've completely revamped my development and build environments to adopt the latest versions of Windows, Visual Studio and Windows Installer XML.  In the process I decided that it was time to look at WiX Toolset v4.0 (beta) and the implications on Industrial Strength Windows Installer XML.

I had read tidbits about WiX v4.0 being a redesign with tons of breaking changes.  I had also read that WiX v3.x would have many more releases.   My concern was that eventually v4.0 would be complete and it would result in IsWiX become end of life.

My findings at this point are:

• WiX v3.x and v4.x mostly install side by side.   You end up getting two sets of the compiler and MSBuild targets files which means that you can have wix v3 and v4 projects in the same solution and they will both build.
• WiX does not install Votive side by side.  Last one on (or repaired) currently 'wins'.  For the most part this isn't completely horrible since Votive hasn't really changed much.
• WiX will only show you project templates for the version of Votive that is active.  So if you want to create a v4 project you might have to repair WiX v4 and if you want to create a v3 project you might have to repair v3.   Read on for how IsWiX is a little different and doesn't have this problem.
• WiX v3 and v4 have completely different XML and C# (DTF) namespaces along with different Import statements in their .wixproj files.  Presumably WiXCop or some other tool will help with migrations but at this point it's all done by hand.
• WiX v4 is currently beta and buggy.  Attempts to use WiXUI and Merge/MergeRef resulted in light errors. 

Ok, so with that as our current platform, here's what I've done with IsWiX

• IsWiX has a series of project templates that get zip'd as part of the build process then laid down and registered with Visual Studio during the install.  I split them into two sets: v3 and v4. 
• The project templates screen is starting to get a little crowded so I organized the installer to have v3 and v4 project template features.  They default to install if the WiX v3 / v4  MSBuild targets are found.  This way people who don't yet have WiX v4 don't have to be bothered by the new templates.
• I had a lot of hardcoded namespace references in IsWiX.  This has all been refactored so that IsWiX looks at the in memory document and uses the v3 or v4 namespace as appropriate.
• The namespaces designer view now offers the correct sets of namespaces based on the above root namespace behavior.
• The XML editor designer view also has the same behavior for proper validation / intellisense processing.
• I tested all of the designers but there is a chance that one of my refactoring's, well, sucked.  I'm sorry, I don't have unit tests to know for sure.  If you find a bug, please report it and revert to IsWiX 3.0.  I will follow up with an IsWiX 4.0 fix in a matter of days possibly hours.

 

So, I think that's about it. Head on over to CodePlex to download the new release!  Here's a few pictures to illustrate the above points:

 

DTF Bug with new Windows 10 Apps and Features

One of my customers came across an uninstall issue on Windows 10 and shot me an email.  It seems Windows 10 has a new way of adding and removing software:

The problem was users were calling into my customers helpdesk reporting the uninstall being blocked by a custom action. The common theme was that uninstall from the legacy Programs and Features worked but that it failed from the new Apps and Features.  My customer provided me log files and the following stood out:

Action start 11:22:33: REDACTED.
SFXCA: Failed to create new CA process via RUNDLL32. Error code: 575
CustomAction REDACTED returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)


This indicated a WiX DTF SfxCA error.  575 means that RunDLL32 failed to initialize. 

In my good log I saw:

Action start 11:36:35: REDACTED.
SFXCA: Extracting custom action to temporary directory: C:\Users\REDACTED\AppData\Local\Temp\MSIAFD1.tmp-\
SFXCA: Binding to CLR version v4.0.30319
Calling custom action REDACTED!REDACTED.CustomActions.REDACTED
MSI (s) (30:20) [11:36:36:464]: Doing action: REDACTED
Action ended 11:36:36: REDACTED. Return value 1.

That's what I expected to see.  Ok, so what's different?  Again I looked at the logs.

=== Verbose logging started: 10/17/2015  11:36:34  Build type: SHIP UNICODE 5.00.10011.00  Calling process: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE ===
MSI (s) (30:20) [11:36:34:401]: Command Line: REMOVE=ALL CURRENTDIRECTORY=C:\Windows\system32 CLIENTUILEVEL=2 CLIENTPROCESSID=2704

and from the bad:

=== Verbose logging started: 10/17/2015  11:22:31  Build type: SHIP UNICODE 5.00.10011.00  Calling process: C:\Windows\ImmersiveControlPanel\SystemSettings.exe ===
MSI (s) (1C:F0) [11:22:31:794]: Command Line: REMOVE=ALL CURRENTDIRECTORY=C:\Windows\ImmersiveControlPanel CLIENTUILEVEL=2 CLIENTPROCESSID=3420


My customer was using WiX 3.7. I decided to set out to reproduce the problem with 3.7 and 3.10.  My first attempt failed as I scheduled the custom action for deferred and it worked.  However when I changed it to immediate execution, I was able to reproduce the problem.   That's very strong evidence o me that this new "immersive control panel" process has an environment that is impacting DTF's ability to find and launch RunDLL.

Hopefully this write up will help the WiX guys find a resolution.  You can find the bug logged here.

Update:

 Further testing indicates this is limited to 64 bit Windows 10.  32 bit seems to function normally.

I did a simple Type 2 EXE custom action test and it called RunDLL32 just fine.

<SetProperty Id="RunDLL" Value="rundll32.exe" After="AppSearch" />
  <CustomAction Id="test" Property="RunDLL" ExeCommand="printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /?" />
<InstallExecuteSequence>
  <Custom Action="test" After="InstallInitialize">REMOVE="ALL"</Custom>
</InstallExecuteSequence>