[wix-users] Visual Studio Versions

[Christopher Painter]

Yup. I was doing product line installers (  dozens of similar but different installers across dozens of repos and branches each with 10,000-20,000 files spread out over 100 features and bootstrappers with up to 30 packages in them )  about 10 years ago.  That was the genesis of IsWiX as we had out grown InstallShield.    We were cranking out 100,000 builds a year back then. 😲

Sure, VS is just the development IDE.  MSBuild is what ultimately gets called in my CICD pipeline.

From: Edwin Castro <egcastr at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2018 10:14 PM
To: Christopher Painter <chrpai at iswix.com>
Cc: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>
Subject: Re: [wix-users] Visual Studio Versions

We do have different solutions for product code versus installers. That said I don't use visual studio to build. I use msbuild and the wixproj projects directly since I need to rebuild lots of different projects for various configurations that get consumed by common components later on in away that is noy easily done with visual studio solutions. I mostly use the solution as a container for the IDE to open all the installer projects at once. I mostly use Visual Studio as a glorified XML editor (a very good one in my opinion).

If we used IsWiX we'd be in good shape. The biggest issue on our end is getting multiple versions of visual studio installed on dev boxes, build servers, etc. There seems to be apprehension to installing multiple versions of Visual Studio even though it most definitely supports side-by-side installs.

--
Edwin G. Castro


On Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 20:03 Christopher Painter <chrpai at iswix.com<mailto:chrpai at iswix.com>> wrote:
Thanks. I feel for you… I installed VS2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2018 on a Test VM for a CICD deployment group target and I forgot how ugly the VS2012 IDE is. (IMO)

I typically suggest people keep the application code and installer code in different sln  to make sure the app or the installer can upgrade when it’s ready and to simplify project build order dependencies so it sounds like if you were using IsWiX you’d be OK since it would give you a chance to dabble in 2015 if not for only the installer sln?


From: Edwin Castro <egcastr at gmail.com<mailto:egcastr at gmail.com>>
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2018 9:30 PM
To: WiX Toolset Users Mailing List <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org<mailto:wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>>
Cc: Christopher Painter <chrpai at iswix.com<mailto:chrpai at iswix.com>>
Subject: Re: [wix-users] Visual Studio Versions

We're still using Visual Studio 2012 but we don't use IsWiX. We need to support older C++ compilers so we don't rev Visual Studio very frequently. I'm actually hoping we can move on to Visual Studio 2015, at least, but I don't see that happening soon.

Are you at a point where you can't really add new features to IsWiX for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012? If so, perhaps you can just select some version to be the last version supporting those versions of Visual Studio. If keeping that support in the latest versions of IsWiX doesn't keep you from implementing new features, then I don't see a problem having some features that only work on newer versions of Visual Studio. All that said, I don't use IsWiX so I don't have any vested interest in the outcome.

--
Edwin G. Castro
On Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 19:08 Christopher Painter via wix-users <wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org<mailto:wix-users at lists.wixtoolset.org>> wrote:
I'm curious, are there many people still using Visual Studio 2010 and 2012?  Has everyone moved on to at least 2013?   Does anyone know any published studies on this?

I'm curious because I was recently testing my IsWiX application on VS 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2017 and while it still works as designed on 2010 and 2012 it doesn't have the new features that were possible starting with 2013 and I'm not really happy with the incomplete story on 2010 and 2012.

Part of me wants to rip out the 2010 and 2012 support and move forward and part of me thinks that I should just leave it be and let people use it on those platforms if they still are.

Does anyone have any thoughts to share on this?

**The feature gap is multi-project solutions templates that can create several projects all at once and wire up all the references automatically.  Prior to this you had to create  the projects individually and add all the references.  Something that would lower adoption rate.


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