I’ve been out of the writing hoop for a while. The family took of for the east coast this Monday and I took delivery of my new flat panel monitor on Tuesday. So needless to say I’ve been a little consumed… I sat down to see how well WoW would look on it… and well… Look! It’s Saturday already! I haven’t played WoW in so long. Not since I started going to SMUG meetings. It now seems my pendulum has swung the other direction with the purchase of this monitor and a week of free time.
oh well… let’s see if I can get back to the Code Side. Would that be the dark side or the light side?
Also, I tried moving my servers out to the garage and create a wireless bridge with my smaller laptop. But since I started trying to do that in earnest at like 9pm last night, I didn’t quite pull it off. So the servers are out there. Just no connection yet. I may petition for an access point once the pain of this monitor fades from the bank account.
But, yeah, this was all done to gut part of my office so I could setup an art studio for the family.
Oh well.. pictures, and more updates, to follow.
Rob Mensching will love this one. Work has decided that they want me to “patch” an assembly in the GAC. But get this. The assembly is a different build, BUT it’s the SAME version as the one currently installed on the target system.
The reasoning?
“We don’t want to break any of the other files that are dependent on it by changing the version.”
Uh *smack* change the version and GAC it and the originals will still work properly, they just won’t access the new assembly.
“We want the other files to have access to the fixes in this new assembly.”
Uh *smack* recompile the apps dependent on this new assembly and deliver those.
“We don’t want to. Look, can’t you just FORCE the installer to install the same assembly again? Why does MSI not let us?”
Uh *kick* – my hand started to sting – MSI doesn’t let you because it’s inherently stupid and it’s trying to keep you from blowing your head off. It’s not the way to do it. I gave you the choices.
“Oh hey! I usually just run gacutil /i on my dev box to get it to do it. How about we just create a custom action that runs ‘gacutil /i ‘ at the command prompt during the install?”
*gives up* Do you want a blindfold and a cigarette? Or do you intend to see it coming as you shoot yourself in the head?
“What?”
I say it’s the wrong way to do it. I say no.
“We say do it. It works.”
So, anywho. I can produce my resume on request. Please don’t let my work environment set your expectations of my skills.
*sighs*
I’m growing to loath trucks more and more as they are the tool of choice of the Road Rage Artist where I live. I have about a 45 – 60 min commute in the morning (sometimes more) and I’ve had at least 2 occasions now in the last 6 months that some dick in a truck has tried to kill me.
The guy today couldn’t decide if the best use for his truck was to drive UP MY ASS or rather to just try and push me into on coming traffic.
*grumble*
Word of caution: If you’re thinking of buying a house. Don’t buy it in Lake Stevens. Unless you don’t plan on going outside.
Wanna buy my house?
My new desktop… which goes well with the clearview theme.
I’ve got a let to say about gnunit and the trouble it’s been writing simple unit test for smuggle. But I’ll do that in the morning. I’m beat.
Eric just pointed this out to me. (Guess what’s there =) ) Holy cow Google! What next? I guess I’m glad I didn’t pay any money for keyhole. Now I can do everything I’d would’ve, for free.
I noticed an image for mono on some sites – I believe there’s one on Miguel’s site – that says “Project Contributor”. All full of self adulation for my first contributions yet still respectful of how minor, I thought it’d be funny to toss the image into photoshop and, in red, add a caret(^) and “Slight”.
These are things that creep into my brain on that lonely hour long drive back home after the meetings.
And these are the things I post when I should be refactoring.
How it’s more fun to do non-paid work some times? I want to whip up some unit tests for smuggle when I should be hooking the database manager assembly into the deploy manager at work. Oh well…
I sat down to post my follow up but quickly got sucked into everyone elses blogs. There is too much, let’s sum up. Chris covers a lot of it.
Other things I did last night… The ReadyReply rewrite was to the UI stage last night and I didn’t particularly feel like spending the evening in XP. So I decided that I’d just wrap up the project and move it to linux where I could work on the UI in GTK# and also try and be a bit more helpful for the rest of the gang (Eric didn’t have a new build of Meshwork to test in Windows). As it turns out I had the project handy to shout a few lines of my assembly handling code to Eric as he typed away on the box with the projector.
I like the projector method of group hacking… everyone can see what’s happening and it’s a little more comfortable than all standing hunched over someones shoulder. We were all able to watch and learn and have a hand in directing where we were going. We were so XP! *laughs* Sans the unit tests though – and a lot of stuff. Now that I mention that. Part of my home work is to come up with a NUnit presentation for next time – should be easy, there are what? Like 6 attributes to remember? I should just write some unit tests for the core and the interface and have those ready for the presentation. Then the “in class practice” can be writing channel specific unit tests. =) My.. what inspiration.
My other bit of home work is to come up with a channel for our smuggle app. I had a few ideas… a pricewatch channel or a product review aggregator. I had another, but now it’s lost to me. Damn my shotty mind.
I wasn’t as attentive to the project as I could’ve been for a bit because Justin noticed that I’d gotten a comment from Rob Mensching. If you’ve ever had to cross paths with install and MSI then this a fairly cool happening. Sure I’d emailed before, but now I’ve got a comment on the site? (Justin steals my thunder by telling me that doing a search on WiX Mono and a couple other key words and I come up 4th) So anywho, I spent a while composing my response. I’m long winded.
I still need a web page for the company site. I’m utterly uninspired. I might have a look at mojoPortal. They just had a new release. But interesting as it looks from the outset, it doesn’t seem to me to have that company feel to it. But then again.. what do I know? I think I need a designer and not worry so much about an engine.
Oh, and I noticed while trying to compile ReadyReply on Mono, that… well never mind. I was going to say that System.Security.Cryptography.Xml wasn’t implimented. But it shows as being 99% complete. I must’ve missed a reference last night.
I just saw – while trying to make myself show up 4th with a google query – that Rob’s presentation at OSCON 2004 was done with WiX on Mono. Oooh man. I need to talk to him. One step closer to a Main linux box at work. Sure I’ve got a secondary box running linux here but… Don’t tell IT.
Rob asked me about why we/I use WiX in a comment on my post.. I started writing and couldn’t stop.. rather than have a nested reply… I thought I’d just make it it’s own post:
Our current run of installs were created with InstallShield. I think it makes for sloppy bloated MSIs and it allows people to get away with knowing as little about MSI as possible. It allowed people where I work to write jscripts for everything rather than knowing how to have MSI itself to what we wanted.
Then when we had new people install InstallShield our project files (MSI with extra tables and the extension switched to .ism) would corrupt and installshield would go into a looping crash randomly.
I think WiX is the better solution for a serious dev house. It’s making some of our developers have to stop slacking though. Unfortunately my managers have done a LOT of rolling over to make it easier for developers in the past, so it’s going to be a struggle to get them to start diong things right – currently we let them get away with not providing a file list, we just have to back engineer a “working machine” and look at build output and the occasional email notification.
My problem is I have suits waaaay up the line with no idea what’s involved in installs making demands. =(
I had written a C# app a while ago that would read an Xml file to do a quick 2 file one off web download update for them. Then they came to me and asked if I could extend that to do a major upgrade. I freaked out and managed to convince them that this really should be handled by MSI.. that it was an install. So I wrote a generic update framework in WiX and that was our proof of concept. (I emailed the mailling list about the escape characters in SQLScript bug and opened that).
So now they believe me when I say wix is the way to go (even though they want their dynamic file linking back because, as I said, they roll over for the devs.) So my project is to port the 4+ Nested MSI install we have into a single WiX build MSI. And I’m the only one doing it because my friend left.
But now I’m up to my eyeballs in C# code at the mono meeting… so I should get back to it.
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Was it worth all the work? =)
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