Austin meets Heat

Whew it's been hot in Texas lately. AFAIK it's been 100f+ for the last several weeks with no end in sight. Accordign to weather data, the max temp for last month was 106f with an average of 99f and a min of 90f. This month we are tracking for 106f, 102f and 93f. Whew.

So what does this have to do with setup? Well, I've been playing with WiX's Heat a lot lately. I got tired of running heat from a command prompt and then repeating my same cleanup tasks over and over so I decided to automate it a little with a C# winforms application. While I was at it, I added an interesting feature that I thought was a bit gimmicky at first until I started getting feedback on how cool it was.

What did I add? Simple: a FileSystemWatcher that monitors a directory for updates and then dynamically regenerates the wix document, cleans it up and then refreshes the display to show the new WiX code. With multiple monitors you just stage the dirctory on one screen while watching the program write the code for you on the other screen.

It's really a simple concept but everyone finds it quite informative. Once you have what you want you just cut and paste it into your Votive project.

So I was going to call this new tool "Blow Torch" but when I asked a coworker who is also named Chris how he liked the name he just said that he'd call it Austin.

Austin? Hmmm.... Sure, Why not? I like the sound of it.

So the hear finally destroyed our HVAC plant at work and everyone was sent home for the weekend early. This gave me a few hours to work and now I have Austin built and packaged. For now I'm just going to tease everyone with a screenshot but hopefully in a week or so I'll pass all of quality checks and release this tool for others to play with. That process might go faster if people actually bug me for a copy. ( Hint Hint! )

BTW, in case your wondering why the screenshot has a refresh button, I'm working on making it a feature to scan automatically or manually.