Just published a library I created on one of past jobs out of Updater Application Block and WiX’s ClichThrough component. Please meet: DotUpdater It can auto-update an application, just create a RSS feed of updates and Windows Installer (MSI) binaries.
In case you, like me, need to compare version of Office documents (under Windows), just know that TortoiseSVN got a pretty set of scripts for that. It works out of box! YES! You can compare Office documents just like plaintext files!. Just tried it and it worked. If you were afraid of trying, like me [...]
A friend asked me for it, so probably someone might need a jumpstart in unit tests. Here’s a short list of short (though very deep, if not best) intros. Except for JUnit cookbook (~2 pages) (which has a lot of “ports”, like CppUnit cookbook), I’d name: “Endo-Testing: Unit Testing with Mock Objects” at mockobjects.com (Tim [...]
Comparison of Microsoft Visual Studio unit tests (MSTest) vs NUnit, mentioning PartCover and
MSBuild tips: some things you shouldn’t do, and what to do instead.
Another problem with MSBuild bootstrappers that can screw all your installation… If scheduling reboot after installing .NET or other prerequisites, bootstrapper copies itself to run from TEMP on boot. Why not staying where it is – who knows. And definitely, all the other MSIs are not copied, so it won’t find them. Reproduced for me. [...]
Now I know it. It’s Windows Installer error 1618 that I didn’t see somewhy when attempting to fix .NET bootstrapper. Either I was inattentive or it wasn’t there: “Another copy of msiexec is running”. You can’t have two Windows Installers running, at least if one of them installs .NET. Information is from this maillist post. [...]
After Microsoft didn’t include .NET 3.5 in any current release of Windows (read “Vista service pack 1″), some of us developers who believed in long-ago C# 3.0 ads, had to roll back to .NET 3.0 and C# 2.0. Including me. Not mentioning pain of rolling back all LINQ tasties in code and debugging our replacements [...]
Did you ever try parsing C++? What about parsing for every combination of possible define-s at once? Microsoft has a static code checker tools for C++, like FxCop for .NET. That’s awfully complex task, you now see. In .NET you can analyze bytecode, and luckily don’t really need to account for conditional compilation. In C++ [...]
Some pages that somewhy didn’t appear at top of Google searches for WiX help. WiXWiki.com – pretty useful and contains some snippets you won’t find in WiX manual or tutorial. Many of rare code snippets WiX development releases; some broken (last two broken in VS 2008), some contain the very things you’ll need; Justin Rockwood’s [...]
All the software is equally bad… Well, I know some pieces of software that are good, but I won’t mention them today. One of our msbuild vs nant choice criteria is a product versioning support. Sad or funny things are: both don’t include sane tool out of box; both need installing NAntContrib or MSBuild Community [...]
Update: for a ready solution (library), see official release announcement Windows Installer on itself is a pain. WiX saves you from it, mostly wrapping the complexity into XML constructs understandable to non-gurus. Well, not completely – you still have to know: why the heck shortcut didn’t appear in start menu; how to create a web [...]
