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.