Visual Studio Ships the WiX Toolset

The title says it all. Rob Mensching blogged today that the Visual Studio team will be shipping the WiX toolset as product in the CTP release of Visual Studio Team System, code-named Rosario.

WiX is the toolkit for building better Windows installer packages. Rob released it as an open source software project almost four years ago on SourceForge using the IBM Common Public License, which was in and of itself a significant event in the history of Microsoft's open source flirtation.

The significance of this product release is that Microsoft is going the distance of creating an open source project community, then incorporating community work back into a shipping supported product. This is an enormous step. This is very different from how, for example, Services for UNIX ships a large collection of free and open source software as part of the product. All that software came into Microsoft via the Softway Systems acquisition.

Rob's post provides all the details. Congratulations to Rob and the rest of the WiX development community!