Bob Arnson
Senior Software Engineer at FireGiant
Michigan, United States
Summary
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RockstarBob Arnson is a Senior Software Engineer in Michigan with 13 years of focused experience building and hardening installer and setup tooling, particularly around the WiX Toolset. He has a long history at FireGiant and Microsoft designing reliable installers, bootstrapper UIs, and WiX extensions in both C# and native C++, with hands-on work shipping App-V and Flight Simulator updates. Bob is a pragmatic backend developer who improves reliability and security — evidenced by contributions fixing null-pointer vulnerabilities and enhancing MSI extraction and bundle versioning in the widely used WiX repositories. Comfortable across release engineering, tooling, and troubleshooting, he blends deep installer internals knowledge with practical support for developer teams. Colleagues rely on him for turning complex setup and servicing requirements into robust, maintainable solutions.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
21,700reputation
920kreached
586answers
0questions
visual-studio
top-5%
wix
top-1%
guid
top-5%
localization
top-5%
windows-installer
top-1%
Github Skills (27)
nuget10
msbuild10
windows-installer10
wix10
iswix10
dotnet-core10
csharp10
debug9
debugging9
netframework9
data-modeling9
visual-studio9
localization9
guid9
testing8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
wixtoolset/wix3
Mar 2014 - Mar 2022
WiX Toolset v3.x
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 442 commits, 263 PRs in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Bob's contributions primarily focused on improving the WiX Toolset v3.x. Their work included addressing null pointer dereference vulnerabilities in the registry key handling code within the UtilExtension. The user also improved the melt tool by adding an option to suppress the MSI extraction and remove temporary cabinet files unless the -notidy flag is used. Furthermore, they introduced features to the WixStdBA, such as adding the WixBundleFileVersion variable.
toolsetwixwifiwix-toolset
wixtoolset/wix
May 2018 - Jan 2023
WiX Toolset Code
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:154 reviews, 192 commits, 348 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Bob primarily contributed to the WiX Toolset codebase, focusing on enhancing the data model and adding new features. The contributions included updating the codebase to use the latest MSBuild and NuGet packages, improving error messages, and adding support for new features, like the shared component flag. The code changes involved modifications to C# files within the project, indicating a focus on the internal workings of the WiX toolset.
toolsetwixwifiwix-toolset
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