Version 3.0 of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset has been finalized and is now available for download. The Toolset is designed for developers that are looking to create Windows installation packages from XML source code.

The full build string of the gold version of the WiX Toolset is 3.0.5419 build, and projects that have MSI and MSM setup packages built by leveraging the solution can now be upgraded to the latest release. Rob Mensching, the project lead for the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset and a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft on the Live Mesh team, revealed that WiX was initially made available back in April 2004 and that it was at that time the only open source project from the software giant.

“When Visual Studio team members joined the WiX v3 effort it became clear that WiX v3 was also going to be the most stable release of the WiX toolset ever. There were over 900 bugs resolved during the course of the project. But a more important number to me is that we've postponed fewer than 10 bugs and each of them have a workaround. Comparatively, WiX v2 released with over 100 known issues all of which were fixed in WiX v3. All of this makes WiX v3.0 the most reliable set of tools you can use today to create Windows Installer databases,” Mensching stated.

The Windows Installer XML Toolset 3.0 is hosted on SourceForge, a repository for open source projects, much like Microsoft's very own CodePlex. SourceForge is the place where developers need to go in order to download WiX 3.0. Bob Arnson, a developer on Microsoft’s Application Virtualization (App-V) team, and a volunteer member of the core WiX virtual team, revealed that the work was not done with version 3.0.

“There were bugs reported in the final weeks of v3.0 that we concluded weren’t important enough to ‘reset escrow’ and delay the release of WiX v3.0. Most of those bugs are in the queue to be fixed in WiX v3.5. Speaking of… Work on WiX v3.5 has already started in earnest. Burn is coming together nicely and for the trailblazers, Votive is now available for Visual Studio 2010 beta. There’s plenty more work to do, in WiX v3.5 and beyond, but for now, I’m really proud of the work we’ve done in WiX v3.0,” Arnson explained.