[wix-devs] VS2017 extension - fix for issue 5597 creates more problems

[Ivan Peev]

Heath,

Thank you for your feedback! I think it might be useful to be able to
declare and customize what VS SKUs a developer wants to target from inside
the WiX schema (comma separated list?). In this way there will be no need
to hard-code and depend on the compiled SKUs in the VS extension. However,
I'm not sure how difficult would be to have such an option available. Can
you comment on such an option and if this can be easily implemented?

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 1:25 PM Heath Stewart via wix-devs <
wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org> wrote:

> The vswhere.exe implementation is correct in that it’s original requires
> were to target VS (hence the name). SQL is not technically a VS SKU, though
> it is built on the VS shell. They are their own AppID – basically a context
> that defines what features are available, including extensibility (example:
> the old Express SKUs were also built on the VS shell but had different
> AppIDs and didn’t support extensions, nor does IsoShell by default).
>
>
>
> Anyone can update the list of product IDs in the VS extension code, but I
> should warn there’s been a number of problems we, the VS team, have
> investigated with SSMS (i.e. the “SQL SKU”) where extensions don’t always
> work because of some bugs in older SSMS. This means that changing the
> default for the VS extensions may not be good for the end users, but
> perhaps as an opt-in feature of being able to list which product IDs to
> target.
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> on behalf of Rob
> Mensching via wix-devs <wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
> Sent: Monday, June 17, 2019 10:01:19 AM
> To: Heath Stewart
> Cc: Rob Mensching; WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [wix-devs] VS2017 extension - fix for issue 5597 creates more
> problems
>
> Explicitly adding Heath as he owns vswhere.exe as well as this code in the
> WiX Toolset.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> On Behalf Of Ivan
> Peev via wix-devs
> Sent: Monday, June 17, 2019 9:58 AM
> To: wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org
> Cc: Ivan Peev <ivan.peev at gmail.com>
> Subject: [wix-devs] VS2017 extension - fix for issue 5597 creates more
> problems
>
> Hi Team,
>
> We have recently determined installations created with WiX 3.14 beta are
> no longer able to properly discover (VS2017DEVENV) VS 2017 installations
> with
> SKU: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Product.SQL
>
> The above is perfectly valid SKU for a Microsoft tool named "SQL Server
> Data Tools". It uses VS as development and design environment. After
> further analysis we have determined the problem was caused by the fix made
> for issue 5597. I understand this fix was made to closely match a similar
> type of approach already used in vswhere tool. However, this doesn't
> necessarily mean vswhere implementation is correct either. I'm not too
> familiar with the BuildTools installation problem and why it necessitates
> such a fix, but at this point I believe the fix made is more harmful than
> the issue it tries to address.
>
> I would like to ask the team to either completely remove the check made in
> InstanceInProducts function or if there is a valid reason for such check to
> exist, to make it more relaxed. Meaning instead of checking for specific
> SKUs, to instead check if the SKU starts with:
> Microsoft.VisualStudio.Product
>
> In this way a valid SKU like the one listed above will be properly
> detected. Looking forward to your feedback.
>
> Regards,
> Ivan
>
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