WiX: "Rosario" WiX toolset vs. the community WiX toolset

This post is a follow-up to Rob Mensching's "Visual Studio ships the WiX toolset" blog entry.

One of the key tenets WiX development is operating under is to make all changes available to both community WiX as well as "Rosario" WiX. (They actually get fixed for the community first :))

Each time we make a major "Rosario" WiX release, I plan to list the major differences between community WiX and "Rosario" WiX.

Differences:

Signing - The WiX binaries shipped with Visual Studio will be signed with a Microsoft signature rather than the community WiX signature.
Contents of the installer - In order to limit our test surface and ship the mainline tools in the highest possible quality, there are a few tools that will not be shipping in the VS package. Another option we are exploring is to supply some sort of SDK for the tools we don't plan to provide mainline support for.
Supported VS versions - The "Rosario" WiX toolset will only install on VS 2008 while the community version will continue to install on both VS 2005 and VS 2008.
Nant - No support for Nant will ship in the "Rosario" box.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 29, 2007
  PingBack from http://www.absolutely-people-search.info/?p=1283

• Anonymous
  November 30, 2007
  Peter, Thanks for keeping us updated on this. Will the source code itself be branched?  Is there a possibility for some code changes to put into the MS release but not the community release? Ben

• Anonymous
  November 30, 2007
  Currently, all code fixes are going into the same branch of the code. The community version and the VS version both pick up their contents from the same location. There is a possibility that some code changes would need to occur for the VS release that dont make sense to go into the community release but the goal is to minimize these differences and document them.

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2007
  Since my last update some changes have appeared in the steps needed to create a patch using Wix. The...