[wix-users] IsWiX v4.15.39 Release (WiXToolset v4 preview 1 and FireGiant Heatwave support)

[Christopher Painter]

WiX-Users,

For those who don't know,  IsWiX is a set of project templates and graphical designers for authoring WiX based MSIs.  It's an open source project that I started about 12 years ago.

I've been wanting to test WiX v4 for a while but the pieces I needed (mainly Votive and working merge module creation and consumption) weren't ready every time I checked.  I started to have some concerns but I kept them to myself and assumed that all would end well in the end and worst case I'd just stay on v3.

I can happily say the WiX Toolset and FireGiant teams surpassed my wildest dreams of how easy moving to v4 would be.  The right click | upgrade to v4 is almost completely painless and amazing.  I know it'll be even better when we get to GA.

Rob reached out to me a bit ago to give me a demo of WiX v4 and their new product Heatwave Community edition.  Votive is not being upgraded to support v4 because it's using an older VS SDK that is very painful to support.  In WiX v4, the all-new Heatwave replaces Votive and has support for VS2019 and VS2022.  He showed me the current state of things, we shared roadmaps and came to an understanding that I could still build IsWiX on top of Heatwave just like I always have with Votive.

Now that the WiX and Heatwave previews are released and I'm proud to announce that I've completed adding support to IsWiX.  The preview release is available at:

https://github.com/iswix-llc/iswix/releases/tag/v4.15.39.0

The main features in this release include:

Project templates for v3 (Votive) and v4 (Heatwave).

Ability to process both v3 and v4 schema wxs files.

General Information designer updated to understand the new Package / Module / SummaryInformation element relationships.

In summary you can on a project by project basis stay on v3, upgrade to v4 or start new on v4 and IsWiX will work the way it always has.

Now IsWiX has been and always will be a FOSS project. I'm proud of it and I've used it to create many, many, many installers.  However, I've never had enough developer assistance to make it as full-featured as I'd like.   There is the possibility that FireGiant will develop a much enhanced paid edition of Heatwave in the future and I welcome them doing so.  I appreciate every investment that everyone makes in this space.

Thanks,
Christopher Painter
President and Managing Member
ISWIX LLC