Saturday 24 September 2016

Announcing: MapGuide Open Source 3.1 RC1

Here's the first release candidate of MapGuide Open Source 3.1

Of the fixes made since the Beta 2 release, the most notable will probably be that the installer should now work properly on Windows 10. Didn't this work in the past? Yes it did, but when it did work, Windows 10 was still in preview and the version of IIS was most likely not the version it is now (10.0).

Why is this important? Because the windows installer does an IIS version check to determine what screens to present in the Windows Installer UI. Our version check was:

IISVERSIONMAJOR >= "#7"

Which basically says: show the IIS-specific UIs (and allow advancing through the IIS-specific screens) if the Windows Installer detected IIS (version 7 or higher) on the host machine. On Windows 10, the version reported is "#10".

And due to how lexicographical string comparisons generally work, the above check fails because "#10" is not greater than "#7". Ain't Microsoft versioning great? They skipped Windows 9 to avoid a whole class of version checking problems, but as we've found out some still slip through the cracks. The IIS installer check is now:

(NOT IISVERSIONMAJOR = "#0")

Which just means show the IIS-specific installer UI screens if IIS is present. We don't care what version it is, and "#0" signifies that IIS is not installed. 

And the reason we don't have to care about the particular version is because the versions of Windows that our installer supports will have IIS 7 or higher. So unless Microsoft decides to move away from an appcmd.exe-based approach to IIS configuration in the future, the Windows installer shouldn't have anymore IIS-related issues in the foreseeable future.

So with that interesting version story out of the way, here's the binaries at the usual place.

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