Setup Matters

Every Patch Tuesday, we look at the CVEs that Microsoft releases fixes for to see if any affect us—personally or professionally. Almost always, the answer is 'no.' But this month, the answer is 'yes.' It's not an actual vulnerability in WiX, but an affected assembly ships in WixToolset.Sdk, so we're releasing WiX v7.0.1 to avoid it.

October begins the Three Months of Everyone's Favorite Holidays™—Halloween, Thanksgiving (US variety), and Christmas. Our meetings for these three months safely avoid the holidays themselves, but please feel free to bring turkey next month and egg nog in December.

Ah, September, pumpkin-spice season and the beginnings of sweater weather. (Except here in the American midwest, it's 'shorts weather' until there's snow on the ground.) Here in the WiX repo, the summer vacation season meant we had only a few bugs to triage today. Luckily, they were interesting and, more importantly, Rob volunteered to take them, so I'm free and clear.

With more than 300 meetings under our belts, earlier this month the WiX Toolset YouTube channel turned 13 years old! We began lovingly hand-writing these meeting highlights a year and a half later. As an official teenager, you can expect the channel to go through mood swings and start to test boundaries and break a bunch of dumb rules, fighting for its right to party. We expect the channel to quickly mature and buckle down on its studies.

We're at that point in Northern Hemisphere summer where the weather is actively taunting us. For me here in the USA Midwest, late July is usually the swampiest part of summer. But this week, it's comfortable during the day and actually chilly at night. It won't last, of course. Rob's dealing with the outdoors at body temperature, which is the weather being so mean to all those Washingtonians who don't have air conditioning because it's hardly ever needed. Until it is. I wonder if I could buy a nice three-bedroom cave somewhere...

Our fortune continues this month: We have only a few issues reported and none indicate an incoming storm of fallout from the release of WiX v7 back in April. We'll count it as skill more than luck, but either way, it's giving me time to roll the ol' icosahedrons and figure out what I'm working on in WiX v8. Gotta have something to do when staying in the air conditioning away from the bright daystar.