[wix-devs] WIP 6108: .NET Core SCD-style BA

[Sean Hall]

Today, the mbahost shows the prereq BA whenever it can't load .NET. There's
no way for an MBA to get the prereq BA to come up if it relies on anything
else.

With an SCD BA, it could fail to load the .NET Core runtime if a native
runtime dependency is missing (one example is VCRedist -
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/dependencies?tabs=netcore31&pivots=os-windows).
I'm with Rob in thinking that showing the prereq BA with an SCD BA is an
anti-feature. But can we get away with not showing anything if it fails to
load? Are we going to have to add support for showing some kind of message
in that case?


On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 05:44 Rob Mensching <rob at firegiant.com> wrote:

> I don't have enough context to know if separate BAs are needed. If the two
> options share "enough" code on BA is fine. Otherwise, if there are
> interesting differences, separate BAs is fine as well. Picking the correct
> ba.dll out of the Bal.wixext will be straight forward.
>
> Question: When would SCD ever need the prereq BA? I thought the whole
> point of "self-contained" was that it would never need anything else
> installed. Is it possible a .NET Core WPF/WinForms app would need other
> packages installed? VCRedist? Other? At a certain level, supporting "other
> stuff" is a bit of an anti-feature. The BA UI should be lightweight and
> just show UI. It's not intended to change the system in a big way.
>
>
> Regards,
>
>   Rob Mensching
>   CEO
>   FireGiant
> _______________________________________________________________
>  FireGiant  |  Dedicated support for the WiX toolset  |
> http://www.firegiant.com/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wix-devs <wix-devs-bounces at lists.wixtoolset.org> On Behalf Of Sean
> Hall via wix-devs
> Sent: Friday, January 17, 2020 1:44 AM
> To: WiX Toolset Developer Mailing List <wix-devs at lists.wixtoolset.org>
> Cc: Sean Hall <r.sean.hall at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [wix-devs] WIP 6108: .NET Core SCD-style BA
>
> I looked into how to load the .Net Core runtime for a framework dependent
> deployment (hostfxr_initialize_for_runtime_config). That API will make sure
> that the app can run on the runtime that gets loaded, but can't be used for
> self contained deployment. So our host will have to call a completely
> different API for SCD vs FDD.
>
> Does it make sense to have a separate BA for SCD and FDD? What would the
> names be? The only way that makes sense to me is if the SCD one never
> brings up the prereq BA.
>
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 10:37 Sean Hall <r.sean.hall at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I created a WIP for an initial version of a .NET Core BA. The WIP pull
> > request is at https://github.com/wixtoolset/web/pull/39 and the code
> > pull request is at https://github.com/wixtoolset/Bal.wixext/pull/8.
> > Feedback is appreciated.
> >
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