Adding to Bob Arnsons’s post about Burn I can say that the first application to ship based on the Burn chainer engine is likely to be Dynamics NAV 2009. I have been working on the setup chainer for the said product since summer last year when Rob handled over the initial implementation for Burn he had done (over an undefined weekend) to me. Since then I have been building the initial implementation of the Burn core and contributing it back to the WiX project as part of my job building the setup chainer for Dynamics NAV 2009.

Currently Burn is capable of executing a chain of EXE and MSI installers and handles full rollback capabilities. It is able to detect machine state and take appropriate action based on a product’s, or individual feature’s current install state versus the requested install state.

It also features a property handler similar to Windows Installer with a property expansion syntax like “Value of MyProperty: [MyProperty]” for formatted strings. As well as a conditional expression syntax also similar to Windows Installer like “[MyProperty] = 1” to conditionalize packages etc. Properties can be passed on the command line (thanks to Bob) or set using a registry search. They can then be used in formatted MSI property values or EXE command line arguments.

Bob and Rob are currently doing some heavy work to add support for external UX DLL’s and a standard embedded XML manifest. As well as restructuring the code quite a bit based on their added requirements.

As for me I am quite proud of the setup chainer we have built for Dynamics NAV 2009. I hope Burn will help a lot of people out there by making it easy to build setup chainers, and being a valuable addition to the WiX toolset once officially released. Be it v3 or v4.

After my first attempt that ended over a year ago, I have had plenty of time to consider my experiences from writing my previous blog entries. Now I am starting my second attempt with the following modifications:

• No more third-party software for the web site.
• Clear focus on what I am doing on the WiX project.
• Minimal number of personal posts.
• Posts on a “something to say” basis rather than on a forced regular basis.

Any old posts are gone – I dropped the database without saving anything. But there wasn’t anything useful in there anyhow.