Paraffin 3.6–Now Keeping Custom Added Namespaces

Paraffin 3.6 can be downloaded here: https://training.atmosera.com/CS/files/folders/18310/download.aspx

Dan Gough had an excellent feature request to have Paraffin copy over any manually added namespaces to the .WXS file like the following. Previously, Paraffin ignored them, but no more.

I updated Paraffin to copy over any namespaces added to the Wix element when creating the .PARAFFIN file. If you were having Paraffin inject additional elements with a .ParaffinMold file, now it’s easier than ever to keep your WiX fragments up to date.

When adding custom namespaces, put them before the default xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi" as I’ve shown in the snippet above. With LINQ to XML, the xmlns attribute is special and does not show up in the Attributes collection so there’s no way I can sort it with the rest of the values. When generating the output XML file, XDocument always puts the xmlns attribute last. I tried all sorts of tricks to get it placed first but never got them to work.

There’s no trouble if you place your custom namespaces after the default xmlns, but in the .PARAFFIN file they will always appear first so you’ll see more changes when you diff the .WXS and .PARAFFIN file.

Please do let me know if you have feature requests! I considered adding a command line switch to allow adding custom namespaces when creating a .WXS fragment but didn’t think that would be used very much so decided against it. Of course, now that I’ve mentioned this option everyone’s going to ask for it. <grin!>

If you’re not familiar with Paraffin, please read the Zen of Paraffin document in the root directory of the download.