So, it would appear the one of the pillars of the WiX community, Derek Cicerone, is retiring from WiX and moving on from MS at the same time.  I want to personally, publicly thank Derek for his enormous contributions to this effort.  WiX is typical of most open source projects that have success, in that there is a strong leader and a few key contributors that keep it going.  WiX has a thriving user community, but very few actually contribute to the code base and other key deliverables like documentation (me included).

When one of the pillars of an open source project steps down, it is always leaves a vacuum that is difficult to fill.  I'm sure things will continue to move forward, but it is always a little scary to image how things will be without that person.  Hopefully someone will step up.  It won't be me, so I'm lame.  :)

I've had a few personal email interactions with Derek and have always found him to be a good guy and have admired his leadership and style.  Good luck with your next endeavor.

So, why is an LDAP/Identity guy like me interested in an open source project that facilitates authoring MSI files for software deployment?  Is that a little out of your realm.  Well, as a matter of fact, deployment is something I'm really interested in and had to dig into pretty deeply for one of my projects at work.

My story involves the web single signon project that I was brought in to save 2 years ago when I took on my current role in my company.  It all boils down to having a package of vendor software that needed to be installed on IIS web servers to provide our own customized version of the vendor's software.  The software is a bit tricky, in that there is an ISAPI filter and a web service extension (IIS6 only!), a bunch of login UI pages, some home grown config tools and a Windows service that integrates with the web service extension.  It needs to support install, uninstall, upgrades and migration of settings from one version to another from a custom Apache-style config file.  It is non-trivial.  :)

During this time, I learned many important lessons about setup, most recently how important it is to use ALLUSERS=1 if you want per-machine installs (per-user installs, the default, results in chaos for server components when multiple admins perform tasks on the boxes!). 

I'm also the proud owner of a little component our company uses fairly extensively that is basically an HTTP Module that gets installed in the GAC, registers with VS.NET for "add reference" integration and installs an event log and source.  This thing was whipped up with VS, but I'm converting it to WiX sometime soon so I can get away from the dreaded installer classes (a topic for a different thread at a different time).

So, my angle on setup is really focused on deploying to the enterprise, not commercial software, and doing server side stuff, often with a bunch of .NET stuff, IIS integration and Windows instrumentation features.  At our company (and maybe yours too), we struggle to successfully deploy web apps, especially the complex ones, and have a mandate to make this easier for the admin.  As such,  I think this arc has a future in my career (although we've got a long way to go before this stuff gets institutionalized). 

Anyway, in other news on WiX, Jamie Cansdale (of TestDriven.NET fame, a fellow WiX user for his own product and a hell of a nice guy that I had lunch with at the last MVP summit on our way out of town) reports that WiX v3 may be adopted as the native deployment technology to be integrated into the next VS.NET release.  It looks like the VS team may finally drop their proprietary authoring thingy in favor of something more powerful and integratable (sic) into an automated build process. 

Good call guys.  I hope it works out.

(Update, ~2 hours later)

In going back and rereading Rob's original post, I think he was talking about the VS team's decision to build the VS installer itself with WiX, not an indicator the vdproj files will be WiX-based anytime soon.  Rats.  This is still a good thing, as strong internal commit to use WiX tends to assure some sort of a future (VS.NET, Office, SQL, etc.), but this would have been cool.

Maybe I've got this wrong and they'll shock us?  I think it makes a whole lot of sense, although this is a pretty difficult thing to convert from and a big jump for a lot of people.