1. The WiX install *does* chain NETFX 4 in because that is needed before
the WiX BA can show UI (since the WiX BA is written in WPF).

2. Dogfooding is the primary reason.

3. We save *significant* bandwidth using Burn because during normal
installs it only downloads the portions of the product that you actually
need.

If *everyone* start using /layout those savings will be lost. <smile/>
4. The wixstdba UI is not as functional as we'd like but the web install
experience is significantly better. Click download like, survive the web
browser screening process (this gets better if we can get WiX signed),
click "Run" and in a second the ~500kb exe is verified and running. Then
you have a nice experience while the process downloads and installs only
the parts you need.

Admittedly, if you want a full layout, then you do "Save" and have to run
another command-line. That scenario is not optimized.

5. ISOs are inferior to /layout because they do not get the built-in robust
downloading of Burn. You could use a 3rd party downloader but that 3rd
party download cannot verify the downloaded ISO file the way Burn will
verify and retry each file.


We are moving the cheese a little bit here to challenge the status quo and
see if we can't make things better for advanced users and less-advanced
users at the same time. My takeaway is that we may have deprioritized the
/layout scenario too much and should evaluate that going into the home
stretch.


On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Christopher Painter <chr...@iswix.com>wrote:

> Other then being allowing WiX to dogfood Burn,  what benefit does the WiX
> installer even gain from using Burn?  I thought the old Mondo UI looked
> just fine and it was a simpler 1 MSI story to boot.   My experience with
> the Burn based WiX installers is that user experience is inferior relative
> to what it was.   It doesn't seem like to me that WiX.msi needed any of the
> capabilities of Burn as it doesn't do things like install the .NET
> framework for you or chain multiple packages together.
>
> Personally, I still want my Visual Studio in ISO format and when SP1 comes
> out I'd appreciate a service release that contains it.  I get sick of
> spending 20 minutes to install Visual Studio and 60 minutes to patch it.
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> From: "Bruce Cran" <br...@cran.org.uk>
>
> Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 8:43 AM
>
> To: "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset."
> <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
>
> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Wow!
>
>
> On 05/03/2012 14:01, keith.doug...@statcan.gc.ca wrote:
>
> > The below news is somewhat distressing for those of us who have no
> Internet connection at all on our development workstations and have to use
> others (non-development machines) to get such access. Is downloading the
> /layout way and then (say) moving a directory or something going to work,
> or does /layout change other things (registry)? If it is going to work,
> will the procedure be well documented? If not, what do you propose people
> in my sort of situation to do?
>
> >
>
> > (And if Visual Studio 2011 works either of those ways we're going to be
> in a world of hurt here ...)
>
>
> As I understand it, /layout does nothing more than grab a copy of the
>
> files for offline use - for example the WDK 8 beta comes as a .zip that
>
> looks like it's been created by running /layout since there's
>
> wdksetup.exe and an 'Installers' directory. If you rename the directory,
>
> wdksetup.exe goes online to fetch the files.
>
> Of course it doesn't help if you want to do the download using your Mac.
>
>
> --
>
> Bruce Cran
>
>
>
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