votive, wix, vsip, and all things microsoft

I've been running RC1 for a little while now and I have been converted to Vista! It is very nice. RC2 has just been released and has some minor improvements and bug fixes. I'm downloading and installing it now. You can download it from http://download...

Some people have asked about this in the past on the wix-users mailing list, so I thought I'd just put it here so it's on the web searches. (We really need to do an overhaul on our WiX home page ). This is just copied verbatim from the Wix.chm file...

It's been a while since I blogged and I've been lax about keeping people up to date about the status of Votive, so here comes a much needed update. Several people have recently asked me two different questions recently in relation to the future of...

Well, after many weeks of work, I've finally checked in Votive v3. It is now available after any build >= 3.0.2120.0. You can download it from here . Just to highlight a few of the new features that are available... MSBuild support – the ...

In one of my last blog posts I wrote about how we would be changing the file extension of WiX extensions from .dll to .wixext. Well, it turns out that we won't be doing it for technical reasons. A WiX extension is really just a .NET assembly with an embedded...

I've been using Comcast PowerBoost (6Mbps download / 768 Kbs upload) for about a year and have been pretty happy with it. The speed was fine and the price was good at $33/month. (Although I had to keep calling to get them to lower the price after the...

We will be doing a change that will probably affect most users of WiX v3, so I wanted to get this blog post out in the community to notify people of the upcoming change. Within the next few weeks we will be changing the file extension of WiX extensions...

I use the extremely useful SyncToy to mirror my data between various machines at home. However, it did not work on Vista x64. I found this very handy blog post which tells you how to fix the problem. I didn't feel like installing Windows Network Monitor...

We've been missing information about Votive on our official WiX web page, so I updated the web site. You can check it out at http://wix.sourceforge.net/votive.html . It also has some screen shots.

There have been a couple people to blog about this already (one is here ), but I wanted to point out that Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 are different in how you get IntelliSense working for WiX files. For both you have to copy the wix.xsd...

What is Votive and where is it going? Well, first of all you should probably understand what WiX is. In a nutshell, WiX (Windows Installer XML) is an XML-based language for creating Windows Installer packages (.MSI files) that can install applications...

I got an interesting question today from a person reading my blog, so I thought I'd answer the question here in case other people have a similar interest. The question was how to enable MSBuild support for a WiX project without having Votive or...

It seems we have this question pop up a few times a week on the wix-users mailing list, so I thought I'd add something here as another reference when people are searching the web. Thanks to Aaron Stebner for writing this entry in our WiX.chm file, available...

I thought this was a pretty amusing blog entry ( http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2007/12/18/google-toolbar-slows-excel/ ). While I don't think this was intentional, it's a pretty interesting tactic: just install your plug-in to Excel to slow...

Cool! http://windowsfs.com/eNews/tabid/112/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/2073/Default.aspx

This is probably a no-brainer for most people, but for some reason I banged my head against the wall for about an hour trying to figure this one out. Background Oftentimes you have source files (or in our case aspx files) that contain common headers,...

Check out this blog post from Shahar, one of the devs I work with. http://blogs.msdn.com/cumgranosalis/archive/2007/08/21/code-art-like-ascii-art-only-sucks-so-much-more-to-create.aspx

Here's a nice article written about Excel Services: http://www.aspnetpro.com/newsletterarticle/2006/08/asp200608ab_l/asp200608ab_l.asp It's good to see your hard work pay off with good reviews. We'll see how the reviews are when it's "officially...

If you ever have any Excel Services questions, feel free to use the new forum on MSDN to post your questions. We'll try to be responsive in giving out answers. http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1208&SiteID=1

My team (Excel Server) is currently hiring developers. It's a great team to work on and we do some cool stuff. Since we're still a fairly new team (we just shipped version 1.0 with Office Server System 2007), there's still lots and lots of new code to...

Richard McAniff, one of our corporate vice presidents in Office, had some interesting stuff to say about Excel Services at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Here's an exerpt from the blog at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6149 : I later...

This is a pretty realistic video of what it's like to work here. :) http://on10.net/blogs/tina/Life-At-Microsoft/

I've been using Script# professionally for more than a year now and am also on the Script# virtual team here at Microsoft. It's nice to see Microsoft awarding an Engineering Excellence award to Script#. Nikhil has written a little more about it here:...

The Scobleizer visited our weekly Wix night last night . He took a picture but both K and I got robbed. K's laptop is on the left side of the picture and I'm behind Robert taking the picture. :) Oh well, maybe we'll be in the video when it appears on...

I've gotten a lot of validation for the roadmap I laid out in my last blog entry via the wix-devs mailing list. Most people say that while it's unfortunate that support for Visual Studio 2003 will be cut off, if I get more for free by switching to the...