Setup Matters

Episode 4 wraps up the MSBuild fundamentals with conditions. We dig into how conditions shape your builds, where they can be applied, and a few surprising quirks that slightly unhinge STEF.

I flew solo today as Bob was unavailable for today's meeting. Which means I also get to write these meeting notes. So, 'Hi!' and did you know that today was the 12th anniversary of WiX Online Meetings on YouTube? Anyway, short meeting today, just triage.

In early celebration of Labor Day, we're releasing WiX v6.0.2—a very minor bug-fix release. Rob suggested we could release on Labor Day, as releasing on holidays is a well-established WiX tradition. I provided documentation that the intent of Labor Day was not, in fact, to do extra labor, so we're releasing today instead.

Today's meeting was the shortest we've had a long time because we had Technical Difficulties™ getting both Rob and me being able to talk on the stream. The distance between Washington and Michigan makes two cans connected by string mildly impractical. Nevertheless, we persisted and managed to triage a luckily-short list of new issues.

I'm obviously a bit biased, but I think this episode a great introduction to Imports in MSBuild. We not only dig into the mechanics of Import but also explore some MSBuild conventions and why the conventions exist.

In our ongoing series of summer-related introductions, today is a very warm day for me here on the coast of Lake Michigan but Rob is under a heat advisory in the normally temperate Washington state, about 10 degrees warmer. My air conditioning is keeping my office almost too cold and Rob's is...not working at all. So to minimize the heat, we didn't dawdle and got through our triage quickly. Just a couple more months until Halloween season...