What is the state of WiX v4?

Question

I really feel like I shouldn't have to ask a question on SO to get basic information like this, but I can't find a reliable source anywhere.

Is WiX v4 released? In Development? In Beta? Still being designed?

Lots of people seem to already be using WiX v4, as evidenced by SO questions about it. And it has an official release page on the WiX site, without any mention of "Beta" or "Release Candidate", etc: http://wixtoolset.org/releases/v4-0-0-5205/

However, there are no released versions for v4 on GitHub: https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix4/releases

And the Wix homepage still directs you to download v3.

And one of the developer's blogs has a recent post about v4 that uses future-tense language like "will have" and "should support".

But worst of all, the current version of the WiX visual studio integration tools has templates for v4, which makes it seem like v4 is officially supported!

And when you try to build one of these templates the build error is The WiX Toolset v4 build tools must be installed ... To download WiX Toolset v4, see http://wixtoolset.org/releases/ despite the fact that http://wixtoolset.org/releases/ contains downloads exclusively for v3!

This is a crazy amount of mixed messages.

Is there something somewhere that says officially, definitively what state WiX v4 is in?

Answer 1

From my point of view, WiX 4 is an ambitious rethink of WiX that aims to simplify the authoring and support more then just MSI. That's a bit of a problem for me as I've created an open source project that heavily invests in WiX 3.I've created WiX v4 templates and support but that was just to try to not be too far behind. Not all of it works and the parts that do work I was told was because they simply haven't broken it yet.

I can only speak for myself... I'll probably just stay on v3.x for ever. The v4 development is taking so long that it'll probably really never be done anyways. And if it gets done and is awesome then I'll just have to find a way to update my stuff to use it.

But ya... don't worry about v4 for now. Just grab 3.11 and start coding. Maybe this will help you:

https://github.com/iswix-llc/iswix-tutorials/tree/master/desktop-application

Answer 2

WiX v4 does appear as a number of weekly releases which can be downloaded and installed. I've installed v4.0.0.5918, and it appears to work with the integrated Visual Studio WiX extension v4 projects, though I've not tested this extensively. The wxs project template looks identical to v3.

Considering the progress of v4, although I admit I'm quite new to this, I found a page here going back as far as end 2012! http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/12/12/the-wix-toolset-v4.0-begins/

A more recent article on WiX v4.0 and it's features can be found here https://www.joyofsetup.com/tag/wix4/

Bug fix logs also imply v4 is being developed alongside v3, however indeed without formal confirmation, official releases, or any documentation whatsoever. https://www.firegiant.com/blog/2015/6/2/wix-online-meeting-68-highlights/ https://www.firegiant.com/blog/2017/7/11/wix-online-meeting-130-highlights/