There has been some suggestion that the WiX toolset is a dead project because we have not released a drop to the SourceForge release point in a long while. Those fears are unfounded for three reasons. First, WiX v2 is stable so we are not expecting another build of that version unless a showstopper bug shows up. Second, weekly drops show up at the Weekly Releases release point regularly. Finally, pushing to the SourceForge release point is a manual process for us and ends up a lower priority. In any case, development is still very much active and the wix-users mailing list is still the best place to get your questions answered.

Visual Studio 2008 has recently released and we are happy to announce that Votive is supported in both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. You can also install Votive side by side on both versions of Visual Studio. Support for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 was added in build 3.0.3328 (which also works for Visual Studio 2008 RTM) and the final Visual Studio 2008 RTM bits are in a build >= 3.0.3607, which is available on the weekly releases page.

After many months of being deprecated, its time to say goodbye (builds >= 3.0.2716.0). All FragmentRef's will need to be converted to one of the supported reference elements in WiX 3.0. Examples of these are ComponentRef, FeatureRef, PropertyRef, or CustomActionRef among others.

Many people have asked what's new in WiX version 3. Here is a list of things that have already been done and things that are still in the works.

A brand new version of Votive has been released in the v3 branch (builds >= 3.0.2120.0). Click here for a list of new features.

The old Votive3.msi has been renamed Wix3.msi as of builds >= 3.0.2120.0 to better describe the installer. It is the installation vehicle for installing the core WiX toolset and also Votive, ClickThrough, and other WiX tools.