Text transcript of show #195. January 15, Open Source, Microsoft and The WiX Project with Rob Mensching

Transcription

1 Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds. Text transcript of show #195 Open Source, Microsoft and The WiX Project with Rob Mensching The WiX Project was the first big Open Source project out of Microsoft over 10 years ago! Scott talks to project lead Rob Mensching about how the WiX Installer project got started. How much trouble did he have with Microsoft bosses and Legal? What's next for WiX? (Transcription services provided by PWOP Productions) Our Sponsors Copyright PWOP Productions Inc. Page 1 of 8

2 Lawrence Ryan: From hanselminutes.com, it's Hanselminutes, a weekly discussion with web developer and technologist, Scott Hanselman. This is Lawrence Ryan, announcing show #195, recorded live Thursday, January 14, Support for Hanselminutes is provided by Telerik RadControls, the most comprehensive suite of components for Windows Forms and ASP.NET web applications, online at In this episode, Scott talks about the WiX Project with project lead Rob Mensching. Hi, this is Scott Hanselman and this is another episode of Hanselminutes and I'm chatting today with Rob Mensching who is the project lead for the WiX Project. The WiX Project is an installer application that is open source and is probably the longest open source project that I've seen running around Microsoft. How are you, Rob? so on and so forth. So that's where we've come from. Our next thing is keeping up with the state of the art of installation as people are not shipping one MSI anymore. They're shipping like two MSIs and they need.net Framework and they need MSI.NET Framework in SQL Express or MSXML, and all these different packages can only be put into a single thing so the big thing that we're really seeing in the next version of WiX toolset is not just Visual Studio 2010 support when that ships but also this thing that we call a chainer or bootstrapper that will hook all those packages together again. You'll find them in text files, see all the things you want to build process for output, all these MSI's and then finally an executable that allows you to chain all those MSI's together. So that's what we are about. Okay, wow. That was a 10- year experience in there in a minute. Doing well, doing well. That's right. So this has been going on for a long time. Let's just start at the beginning then. What is WiX and when did it start? So the WiX toolset is a set of tools that build Windows installation packages, so MSI files. The idea that you take source code, which happens to be XML, you feed it into a compiler and a linker in much the same way as you feed C++ code into the compiler linker, and out the other end pops an MSI that has all your files cupped up if you want that. All the stuff are laid out such that you can take that, put it on a CD and ship it to your customers, take that, put on the internet to load to your customers and things like that. The idea originally came from the fact that we had all these tools that were very focused on GUI and you had to go and then plainly click on things but they didn't necessarily fit real well into the development process that was typical inside Microsoft at the time. By the way, we're talking 1999 when I started this '99, yeah. That's when I graduated university and joined Microsoft in '99. So the WiX toolset was different because it was to check these command line tools into your build system and have them make a file. It makes a file because that's what it was made back then and then have them driven in the same way with source control and all that kind of good stuff. A little bit later, I think it was about 2003, we had a guy who joined us and said "How about if I get Visual Studio integration?" So he started to work to create what he called Motive, which is the Visual Studio integration package that gives us all the build goodness and stuff like that, and overtime we've kept up with the source control text files that are built by this command line tools, then we added MSBuild tasks and more Visual Studio integration and So this is a DSL, it's a Domain Specific Language for installers. The XML Grammar is your own, right? Yes, yup. Okay. So it's completely made up and it's a full-fledge language in the sense that it has probably a schema associated with it. Yup. And it allows you, it sounds, more granularities really over your MSI's and was actually present given the GUI that was going on, the GUIs that were available at that time. It depends on the GUI. Some GUIs allow you to get down to the actual table/row concepts that are inside the Windows installer. It's the Windows installer files, the MSI files themselves are little databases. You can actually see them as tables and rows. The goal of WiX toolset was to extract away a lot of the weirdness that were in those tables and rows, and the fact that they are tables and rows because insulation is very hierarchical which would map them really nicely in XML you can imagine, so it has all this cautious -- to hide away some of the nastier details but also give you full control over the Windows installer which was one of the big key things. At that time I was a developer in Office and so I was looking at "Hey, this is a gigantic, huge project. How do we do things to enable this, fit into the build process a bit?" We have some other features that allow you to do distributed development really well so you can take what would be the Office installation and break it up into many small parts where one guy is worried about Winword.Exe, another guy is worried about like MSO.dll and there are all these COM registration and things that host Page 2 of 8

3 together. Each individual developer can be responsible for their individual parts and the WiX toolset, through the compiling and linking, will bring it all back together into one MSI or however you want to organize it. It is design to go to cube scale and provide -- everything that you can do in the Windows installer, we support that in WiX toolset. Wow. Guide the principle. So 10 years ago, you're just out of school and Microsoft is your first and only job. Is that right? Besides, you know, I had an internship at an engineering firm when I was in college and then I had an internship at Microsoft in '98 as well and I came back in '99. So yeah. And how did you have this idea, like was this part of your job where you needed to make open source as part of your job when you said while this existing toolset is unacceptable? So when I was an intern in office where the Windows installer was actually created, so I was an intern on the Windows installer in '98 so I had a little bit of background of what this thing was when I started in '99 and I created mostly tools around the Windows installer. Of course you don't take an intern and say "Here, let me put you on the middle of the engine near the end of our shift cycle and have you just write code in it." They don't do that to interns, so instead I got tools, how to make it easier, things to know about as an installer and stuff like that. At that time I created things like ISIS which are the internal because this is our way, you can think of it kind of like FX cab for C#. We have a static analysis for MSI files. I also created Orca which is probably more famous for which is the assembly level debugger kind of thing that you can get into and see every little piece of a Windows installer file in that row/table format. So Orca is kind of the database editor. It's the Microsoft access of install. Yes, of MSI files, yeah. Hardly anybody uses it today because I stop people who are trying to do this and it's like I'll just get the foreign key relationships right and you have to type all these right and I said this is crazy. So that's when I started getting into, well, you know, there should be a high level of concept and I knew text files were the build process source control. That kind of stuff is an important thing and at the time, we're talking 1999, XDR was coming out. XML and XDR types of things and DPTs are going away but Microsoft is doing XDR, this is before XSD. Anyway, so it's kind of this XML thing when fixed can be good. This can be a good thing and I didn't want to write a whole parser for my language so I said I'll just put it in XML, this makes it all the big thing so in fact if you come to my office you'll see my door tag that I've been carrying around since office because the guys got tired of hearing me say "I think XML is going to be this thing that will be really cool." They gave me a door tag that has Mensching as elements and Rob as text toast, the element not my door tag which across this point people are like yeah, okay, whatever, but back in then XML was a new and exciting kind of thing. The one who's taller took XML, put them together into this project and said "I can learn a lot from this," and then it turns into what we have, it's the WiX toolset today. When you started this, did you ask a boss ahead of time? Again, not only was it XML in the kind of beginning stages, but I think it would be fair to say that open source as far as Microsoft was concern was certainly not on their radar. Were you doing this as part of your job, or are you doing this on the side? So the next tookset has been a side job for these 10 years. I start it because: 1) I thought it would be a good thing for us to have. I was going to learn a lot from it, but I believe in this text file build system for building selection packages and that set can be distributed across many developers. I believe in those things so this project was kind of in a way of taking that philosophy and saying "Look, here is something you can do. Here's the goodness you can get out of it. So I was writing. I mean, the first version was all written in VB Script so I mean like WiX v.1 was all VB Script accrued like 10,000 lines of VB Script code with all the WSF files and stuff like that. The VB Script team loved me at that time because I would stretch their engine. I d file bugs around so it's like going yeah, it doesn't work when you do this. I'm like "Oh, hey." It turns out my roommate later would be one of the guys who worked in this scripting. And so anyway, so it was just an idea that I had that we should do this. Now it was a side project and I had been exposed very little to open source. Just a little bit towards the end, or one of my friends in college had gotten into Debian and stuff like that and I'm kind of like "What is it about? Why do you get the source code for free? It's kind of unique." You know, it's our junior year or whatever. So it was an interesting idea. When Microsoft was like "Well, come inside," it only makes sense that I'm going to work her on the side. You're going to get the source code. It's VB Script. So what if I can get people involved I this project and I knew it was open source but I call it community source for a long time. Look, let's build a community around this thing, let's get people talking about it because, I mean every time I set up geeks here so overtime I got guys that can built one of the session package and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, it's funny that you should point that out. Let's back up for a second Page 3 of 8

4 because we're talking about setup geeks as you'd like to say. These are special kinds of engineers that really, really enjoy writing a great set of application. Legal and Corporate Affairs. LCA is what we call the suits, the lawyers here at Microsoft. That's true. Yes. I have a great amount of respect for those folks, but to see a good setup application is a work of art and I think it would be wonderful to imagine the world one day when there's no setup and that we're just dragging everything in an application folder. But until then a good looking setup like Paint.NET level setup is a beautiful thing. And so I totally agree with you on that, and so the big thing at that time was setup guys also don't tend to get much respect in general. This is kind of like, yeah, just go make it happen. Why isn't this X copy? I'm like it's not X copy because the system has been made harder and the application made difficult not because we like to make our lives difficult. And so it was a nice way to kind of bring this community together and go, hey, there are other people out here that are doing the setup stuff, maybe we can all make our lives better by building tools that help us. Exactly. And so that's what the WiX toolset has been for these years. The open source, so it wasn't open source inside. I mean, it followed all the typical things you get from other source. There's a code, you can get it, you'd send it in, you'd have a mailing list, people talk about it and it was all inside the company until the end of 2003 when I finally got to a point where I'm like, okay, I think it's time for me to go and see if I can take this project, the set of tools that I think would be useful for developers outside the company, and oh, by the way, in that time I've rewritten the VB Script into C# as a way of learning C#. I've switched teams to where we need to use C# but I didn't know it well so I took my VB Script and rewrote this, check into things in C# in a couple of weeks because that's how long they gave me to romp up on the language. So I rewrote it and I'm like, okay, that's great and I said with this C# language I could take this outside the company and people could use it. How do I go about doing that? And so I started going through every group that has LCA wrap. So I went to LCA wrap and I sat down and I said... Okay, slow down, slow down because people on the phone won't, not on the phone rather because I'm talking to you on the phone, people who are listening to you on the show won't know what LCA is so... Ah, sorry. So you actually called the suits. Sure. I call them because people always make fun of lawyers and stuff like that. I love those guys because once I figure out that what they're doing is trying to apply what we do in logic and coding rules and all that kind of stuff, they're trying to apply it to the English language which makes it infinitely harder, but once I figured out about lawyers I was like okay, I get you guys. Hey everybody, this is Scott coming at you from another place and time. No doubt you probably bump into testing tasks now and then in your work and you know writing functional test is probably not your favorite thing. It's kind of difficult. It takes time and the results can be dubious. Well, get ready to start liking tests, thanks to Telerik. With the new WebAii testing framework, building web automation tests is a breeze. You've got code automation with advance ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight applications. You can write a single test, have it execute against multiple browsers at once. You benefit from a rich API, there's LINQ support, integration with Visual Studio unit testing, also NUnit, xunit, and MbUnit, not to mention the free wrappers for a Telerik RadControl for ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight all shipping with Telerik's new testing tool. One of its best features, the WebAii testing framework which is developed by ArtOfTest, is absolutely free. If you're already hooked on WebAii testing framework, start using it right away. Go to for more info. Thanks a lot. Did you just say that the lawyers are trying to code with English? Yes, absolutely. That is awesome. When you get into the interpretations of what open source licenses are, you're going to see all of the debates are about the placement of punctuation and what words are used in things. If we have time, I can tell you some of the CPO. It's kind of fun. So anyway, so I went to the LCA, our legal WRAP and said "Hey, what I'd like to do is release this code." I know Microsoft has kind of been a little more open about releasing code to the externals. Some of the posts in '99 were a lot more do not touch open source at all. Right. Page 4 of 8

5 By 2003, we're starting to be a little more, well, you know, let's do something within the space. I went to a lawyer and he said, "Okay, this is kind of the licenses that we put on that say hey, you can use this but Microsoft doesn't make any guarantees on it, stuff like that." I'm like "Okay, yes, that's kind of like what I'm looking for. I'd also like to be able to have contributions come back." The lawyer kind of stop and he looks at me, he's like "You mean like open source?" And I'm like "Yeah. Like a community where you can hang out and talk about code and stuff." He's like "That's different." I know a guy that happens to be working on that kind of project. So I got looped to this lawyer and I never said his last name, like Steve Makowski or something like that. He doesn't work on that space anymore, but at that time he was like "I know who you need to talk to," and they hooked me in with this business guy that was in the Windows business guy and his name is Stephen Walli, and Stephen Walli said, "'Hey, this is great. Let's have coffee." I'm like "Okay. We're going to have coffee." So I sat down and I looked at him and he looks at me and he goes, "So what are you doing?" I told him the story and he's like "Okay, that's good. That's good." He was like "All right, so what do you want to do?" I'm like "I want to release this. I want to be able to have consciousness, I want a community outside." He's like "Okay, okay. That's good. How much headcount do you want?" I was like "Headcount. You mean like people to work on this project?" He's like "Yeah." I'm like "None. Me and like four guys are working on it right now and we get together at my house on Thursday nights and order pizza and hack on the code and have a good time and laugh and then you know, we do our job during the day." He's like "Perfect." And so what ends up happening is I end up rolled in and he goes to my management, we go to the guys, the management, the one who starts the team and they all talk about "Hey, is this okay? Are you guys okay if we release this project?" It ends up going to Jim Allchin and I have this meeting with Jim Allchin, just an hour and a half meeting. They've been looking for an open source project to release for Microsoft. And just to be clear for the folks that are listening, Jim Allchin is important. Jim Allchin is, at this point and time, the head of the Windows organization, all of it, and so he's a very important dude and we had this meeting and I'm like sitting going "This is crazy, like I'm just a dev." I'm just a guy who writes code sitting here at Jim Allchin's office and they're all looking at me and there have been three meetings before just talking on what they've been looking for. So Stephen Walli talks about the project a little bit about what it is. Jim Allchin looks at me and I don't remember all the questions he asked. He's like "You do this on your free time?" I'm like "Yeah. This is important." He's like "Okay." And he looks at everybody and he goes "This is a good project." And he had his lunch there because we had this lunch meeting and everybody goes "Yeah." He looks at Stephen, he goes "You found your project," and walks out and so I'm like "Cool," and everybody was like "We're signed off?" And so we walked out the door and the admin, I remember she looks and goes "That is the fastest meeting we've ever had." She points at me and she goes, "I like you." So at that point we had approval. The thing we did after that was where do we put the project, what license do we use. Jason Matusow who was a big force in the open source and Microsoft agreements, a guy was great too, we sat down and list a number and we called people and said "What license can we use" and remember, this is before any of the Microsoft open source licenses are registered or anything like that and they said... Right. I'm wondering actually if there's any license before this like was this the first thing that we really pushed out with any kind of open source license? Yes. This is the first thing that came from Microsoft that was a Microsoft project that came out under an official OSI license. So we talked about licenses, we end up settling on the CPL. The legal guys can explain to you why the CPL was this... But what does CPL stands for? The Common Public License. The Common Public License is the third version, I've kind of heard of it as IBM had the IPL which is the IBM Public License that they based on some of the stuff that they have read and like the differences between Apache and the GPL, and then the IBM came out with the Common Public License and later on they went on to the EPL which is the Eclipse, like branches of this. You know how languages, program languages all come back from some language in the beginning, I don't know if it's four through whatever it is. You can see the same thing in open source licenses, this one begets this one and this one begot this one and so on and so forth. So we were picked to use the CPL. Everyone uses somebody else's license that was already approved just to get this project out there and then it was already put in this and the answer was, well, you know, we're going to 2004, it was in 2004, beginning 2004 and I'm like "Oh, you know, the big place people are on is SourceForge." So we're like "Cool. We're going to SourceForge." So April 5, 2004, we released the WiX toolset under the CPL on SourceForge and this is WiX 2.0 because WiX 1.0 was all VB Script and never saw the light of day outside of Microsoft so it's all the C# stuff and poof, there you go, open source for Microsoft on April 5, Huh. Was it too much fanfare or was it too kind of a silent nothing. Page 5 of 8

6 No. So there's a set of interview setup. Jason Matusow had people he's meeting with, but the news was like first release to Mary Jo Foley and so she wrote the thing and then I had a blog by that point and so I wrote the blog post that says this is what it is that's why it exists and yey, that blog post just got flooded with comments and all kinds of different things. People are writing around the world. I remember there were two running themes. The first theme was "Oh, hey, you know, it must be very cold and hell now," which is one of the things. Oh, flying pig is another one, but the one I thought was most funny is like, you know, this is like four days after April Fool's day but I was wondering if Microsoft was just playing a joke on us a little late. Really, wow. They didn't buy it. People did but they were like is this for real? Like does Microsoft really just do open source, and the answer was yeah, we did right there on that day we released it and now we had a whole lot of critics and people saying that it wasn't real, that what we're doing really, for example one of the mistakes I made that I didn't even know was the initial build was release when I release the code and you needed like Visual Studio to build it and people were like immediately complaining, oh, this is just a ploy that they're going to be open source but they're going to force you to buy copies of Visual Studio, and I was like people are going to use WiX toolset because it's so popular among developers like a set of geeks that they're going to buy copies... Oh, that wasn't what my intention was. All right, so then I rewrote the build system and make, literally, and make it tools that were freely available from Microsoft, for example, to quiet all of these different concerns and finally I've got to point to them like you know what? The way that we're going to be accepted by the open source community is by being around for a long time. Exactly. I'll be here. People can be critical that Microsoft is going to do this and they're going to dump it. Or what if I'm like "No." This is the project, I've been doing this up to this point, up to four, five years. This is not the end. At a certain level, this is like the end of the beginning and we're getting into the good stuff now. And so we've been around for five years and all those things are gone now. Now we're just yeah, this is an open source project for Microsoft. There's a whole bunch of them. Yeah, who cares. 10 years now? So at this point you've been out Well, our project have been around for 10 years so for me the WiX toolset existed in 1999, the end of 1999, so it's passed the 10-year mark end of last year and it has been public four or five years. Wow, and does this actually ship in Visual Studio like can I get this in Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, or do I still have to download it separately? You still download it separately. There was a deal we cooked up for a little while to have the WiX toolset shipped as part of Visual Studio 2010 and the business guys got into, you know, like "Yeah, you know, we're not sure. Why don't you guys just keep on doing this?" So the decision was then to go "You know, we're not sure we want to do all the work to bring it into the Visual Studio box with all of that means so why don't you guys stay down." So we're on VS Gallery now so you can get to it through the Visual Studio Gallery on downloading. You can pull it from SourceForge, you can pick a weekly build but we are not in the Visual Studio box. Do you think that gives you less legitimacy? I mean, in the sense that it's still awesome and the accomplishment is great, but did they not put it into the product just out of laziness, or do they think that by putting it in the product it might change the way people felt about it? For me I think I had it in my mind how I could explain the differences between what the community version would have been and the Visual Studio version would have been because they would have been different versions slightly because the community one would have continued and the Visual Studio one would have stopped, stabilize, shipped in the product and then stay there for a long time. We were working on things to try to get it so you can pull the community version out and swap the Visual Studio one out if you want to move forward with the community thing. So we're gaining all these and it was just kind of like where we're at. This isn't exactly the experience we want to have with the Visual Studio guys, but this is exactly the experience we wanted to have. So the effect on legitimacy. The problem with open source projects that are run like a set of volunteers like they are in the way that we run the WiX toolset is that there isn't a company entity behind it that says if you want to pay me money I will support you for using this product. So that is one of the things that I know affects the legitimacy of the WiX toolset like it affects the legitimacy of any open source project which is for the company, big companies typically who want to call somebody up and say I need you to fix this, I want you to fix this now because I'm paying you this much money. We don't have anybody that does that for the WiX toolset today. That's the only legitimacy. After that, five years in the community, we've released the WiX 2.0. We've released the WiX 3.0 version, that released last summer and we're working on WiX 3.5 to bring in this Page 6 of 8

7 chain or bootstrapper. We're alive, we're kicking, we're growing, we get more people all the time. We have people saying both good and bad things about us, about our language, about the way the tool works. I like the good stuff, I appreciate the bad stuff, I take it as oh, that's what we need to fix, got it, thank you for the feedback. We have nothing but, I don't know, another 10 years ahead of us of things to improve. So we're a legitimate open source project. The way all those things work, we are legit. I mean, we had some really big customers, Office, Visual Studio, almost all Microsoft uses the WiX tool setup That helps a lot with people going does the thing really works? This isn't your job though, right. I mean, how does this affect your job at Microsoft? Are you still doing this on Thursday nights with your friends at the house or do you have time at work, on work at 9 to 5 that you can actually work on this? No. The way I still run this is it's the thing I do on Saturdays or Thursday nights. I either read questions in the middle of the day. Quite often when people ask questions sometimes I'll answer them and things like that when they're sent to me and then I just kind of mentally know that, hey, I have to work harder in the evenings or something to catch up any time that I might spend on this. So it's still the side thing for me and that's starting to shift around a little bit but that to me it's still a side project, has been, and I just work harder on my day job I guess. Wouldn't it be better if Microsoft or your bosses give you like Fridays, or Thursdays and Fridays to work on this? I mean, at some point you'll get married and have kids, or get bored or I don't know, get an X-box and suddenly you're weakened, throttle and dry up. So that's true and I did get married to this process. you married? The open source process got No, no, no, no, sorry. I did get married throughout all of this process. I did get married. I started dating when we started calling open source. I got married sometime after it was release as open source. So she kind of came into it knowing that this is the thing that I do which probably helps, but it's not just me. People talk about the WiX toolset, Rob Mensching wrote code. I'm like that's not even close to saying I'm actually on my I think fourth generation of set of people that work on the toolset. I've been consistent through it but we had names like Derek Cicerone who now works for the company in the Valley, Scott Kurtzeborn who still works on office, Reid Gustin, he now works at Google but I mean those guys were all like the first unit. The second unit had people like Justin Rockwood and Bob Arnson. Justin still works in office. Bob works... this. I see. So you're not alone in I am not alone. This project has been oh I haven t counted in a while but -- there are at least I think 50,000 lines of code in the compiler linker. Wow. So it's nontrivially large and certainly not something one person can do in their spare time. No. I mean, could someone write that many lines of code in 10 years? Yes. In the free time? That's trickier. So the fact that I'm not alone is like no, it's this end and people are probably still set so they really like it. Like we like the communities, we like working together, we keep moving forward and we get a lot of nice feedback. You know, regular feedback is usually published. So all this together makes a project roll really. We've been running really well. It hasn't been a problem, and the other thing is that I tend to work in the primary related stuff in all of the jobs that I had at Microsoft so I'm applying that knowledge to the WiX toolset so it's not like I'm out of the domain, nothing about deployment. I'm not just working on the core toolset day in and day out. And the bosses are supportive? I mean, when you have your reviews, they're like "Yeah, good job on WiX thing. Keep it up." So let me give you a real good example of what ends up happening. So this is one of the things. One of the thing is we grow people and we still spend a lot of time growing and the people work on it, probably that's the reason they like coming around. One thing you should do is you wanted to kind of increase your sphere of influence. People you know, things that you can do so you can do a better job with your job by knowing and being connected and just hey, oh hey, I know this other guy, he told me to stay and that's going to make my day job better. I know that that's the kind of thing customers will want, and I previously worked at Windows marketplace which was selling software online and at that time we were starting to bring on Microsoft products into that thing. They've been kind of there but we're trying to get them into better. I was like I happen to know pretty much all the teams at Microsoft so which team -- you know, I could go to our program manager and say which team would you like to go talk to inside Microsoft about delivering their stuff into Windows marketplace. The program manager looks and he goes "You can get me any team I like?" "Oh yeah, just call a setup guy." He's going to be right next the release manager for that Page 7 of 8

8 product and they'll be able to tell you everything you want to know about that. The foreman is just like "That's awesome." So that kind of stuff ends up helping me do my day job better even though I spend my free time doing these other things. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. I just want to understand whether people at Microsoft are expected to do like a bunch of open source work on the side and their regular job and be awesome at everything, and if bosses say things like "Really, you ought to be working on your open source thing less," if they realize that there's not only just life out of work in a personal sense but also in a work sense. All right. I'll have links on the show site so everyone can get to the WiX toolset and a couple of other blog post and interesting things about WiX. Thanks a lot, Rob, for taking the time to chat with me today. good time. Yeah, no problem. I had a This has been another episode of Hanselminutes and we'll see you again next week. Well, you know, if I was -- as far as sucking at my job, I'm sure they'd say "Dude, you know, you probably need to work a little bit harder at your job." So I guess I've always known that I have to do a good work no matter what. Well, this is really interesting. I think it's great that this has lasted this long, that the product is 10 years old and I've got to give you big credit for sticking with it this long. Yeah and I have a surprise coming out in another month that I'm going to talk about around my birthday time that I'm not quite ready to tell you about a month early but... So you're going to tell me that you have a surprise because you're not going to use the show here as your voice box to spread the word. You can't give us a hint? Can you give us something we can guess about? of a hint. and it's... A little bit of a guess, a little bit I'm just saying. It's all related to the WiX toolset Ah, well, you've got it. Well, yes, I wonder how I couldn't have guess that. It will be good so give it another month and I will have -- I've been formulating this blog post in my head. It's kind of have been in this and it has been long coming, took me a long time to make the set of changes that have all come together so give me another month and you'll see it. Okay. So we should check that out at Yup, that's Robby. Page 8 of 8