hey y'all, and sorry i haven't written in a couple of weeks.  we're working hard to ship our first beta of msbuild right now so my blog unfortunately sat down with a hefty piece of neglect pie.  but i'm back now (to the three of you who actually read this; well, two of you if i can't count my mother). 

as many of you know by now, microsoft has dipped its toes into the open source waters by opening up the wix project to the community.  a wise dev on my team pointed out that the wix open source announcement was followed almost immediately by a few requests for msbuild tasks which wrapped the core wix tools.  so on my backburner for the past month has been figuring out how to make sure this happens.  i started by reading a little more about wix and thinking about how it should fit into the build process, and finally before typing any code decided to ask if anyone else at microsoft had endeavored to create such tasks.  i was silly to ask “if” rather than “who” because within about twenty minutes i'd learned that one of our top dogfooders (in another state no less) had already authored working versions of the tasks!  so we're going to work with the wix guys to make sure these useful tasks see the light of day outside microsoft too...

in other task development news, i recently stumbled across some frustrating fusion loading issues, presented to me in the concise, if not elegant, form of HRESULT 0x80131040.  i haven't quite tracked down exactly what the problem is but i'm certainly having fun trying.

have a good memorial day weekend.  i'll be watching “fishing with john“ and a couple of sergio leone/clint eastwood westerns...

jeff.