Since plans were made to ship WiX v3 in the box for Visual Studio 2010, the WiX working group has been working on fixing all outstanding bugs in the WiX v3 code base. Bob Arnson uploaded packages last week as a test on SourceForge and this week the following installation packages were uploaded on the v3 Beta release page.

• x86: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wix/Wix3.0.4805.0-x86-setup.zip
• x64: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wix/Wix3.0.4805.0-x64-setup.zip

(The difference between the two downloads is support for building natively on x64 platforms with MSBuild in the x64 installation package.)

Some major features in v3 include:

• Build patches completely within WiX
• No additional tools required like msimsp.exe from the Windows Installer SDK
• Filter only those resources you want in your patches
• Support for Windows Installer features up to and including Windows Installer 4.5
• Deployment Tools Foundation (DTF)
• Rich managed framework for Windows Installer APIs
• Supports managed custom actions appropriately (out-of-process)
• Support for binder extensions
• Stability improvements
• Performance enhancements
• Compressing files on multiple threads
• Other performance improvements
• Localization improvements
• Tools are localized
• Code pages and locales are handled better

Please download and install WiX v3 and report any bugs you find. We’re working hard to stabilize WiX v3 for production environments inside Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 as well as outside of Visual Studio using MSBuild or just the command line tools directly.