[wix-users] WiX 4.0 Errors and Current / Future State Questions

[Christopher Painter]

I maintain a certain open source project (http://iswix.codeplex.com)  that currently works with WiX 3.x.  I'm currently going through the code base and refactoring it to be compatible with WiX 3.x and WiX 4.x.  In doing so, a few questions have come up:


1) WiX 4.x and 3.9 installed side by side however WiX 4.x votive took over.   I have project templates for 3.x and 4.x and for now I'm thinking that if I detect 4.x I should install the 4.x templates otherwise install the 3.x templates.  Is this correct or will there eventually be an ability to say File | New | Project and select either 3.x or 4.x compatible projects?


2) After doing my refactoring I got light errors in my wxs.  Wanting to rule out that my project templates are buggy I reproduced these errors using the WiX provided project templates.  They are as such:


a) Adding a UIRef to WiXUI_Advanced, WiXUI_FeatureTree, WiXUI_InstallDir or WiXUI_Mondo generates the error:

Error '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. SetupProject2 light.exe


b) Adding a UIRef to WiXUI_Minimal generates the error:

Error Duplicate symbol 'WixAction:InstallUISequence/WelcomeEulaDlg' referenced by C:\agent\_work\335d34b3\wix4\src\ext\UIExtension\wixlib\WixUI_Minimal.wxs(60). This typically means that an Id is duplicated. Ensure all your identifiers of a given type (File, Component, Feature) are unique or use an access modifier to scope the identfier. SetupProject2 C:\agent\_work\335d34b3\wix4\src\ext\UIExtension\wixlib\WelcomeEulaDlg.wxs 54


Now I could just comment out my UIRef for now but a bigger show stopper for me is:


c) When I add a Merge element I get an error message saying it doesn't belong to a feature (as it should).  However when I add the MergeRef element to the feature I get the error:


Error Value cannot be null. SetupProject2 light.exe 0



So overall, I'm wanting to adapt my toolset to support 4.x so that a 4.x user can use my toolset and so that a user already using my toolset can use 4.x.   Am I just too early?    Are these issues to be expected?


Thanks,

Chris