Mark Nicholson - All Comments

KeyPath for component: is a Directory: . The directory/component pair must be listed in the CreateFolders table

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:19:41 GMT

We've been finalizing one of our first new products in my company's product line and we're

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re: Installer Hell

Morten L — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:26:26 GMT

I find that WiX has much potential, and have managed to solve all my problems. Just need to integrate it into team foundation and automatic build. Just wish there were some tools to include files into wsx files. But WiX is getting there.

re: Microsoft IE Team sends a cake to Mozilla Firefox Team

Willie Roberts — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 20:23:20 GMT

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!

re: Tech-Ed 2006 (Sun City)

markn — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 23:20:43 GMT

I hear you ahmeds, it's just we've all pretty much seen ASP.NET and WinForms, so it is the new technologies that should take centre spotlight. All in all though, I found the whole thing very valuable. Good job.

re: Tech-Ed 2006 (Sun City)

ahmeds — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:30:04 GMT

This is one of those difficult things where the dev track has only about 18 sessions. Assuming you have 3 sessions each on WF, WCF and WPF (and 3 is not much) you are left with 9 sessions and you still have ASP.NET (huge topic), WinForms, mobility, VB, C#, Software Factories, TFS etc etc - you get the idea. We would really need at least 50 dev sessions in order to be able to cater for more depth. So it is a real fine balancing act

re: Tech-Ed 2006 (Sun City)

willy — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:08:01 GMT

saArchitect Community is planning initiative "Thor", which will deliver drill-down workshops on WF and WCF.

re: Installer Hell

shane — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:12:11 GMT

Meh, you just need to harden up :) I have been thru that, WiX still has a few warts, but if everything "just worked out of the box" then there would be no skill to being a developer, yeah? If you really want to push your WiX skills, try adding custom tasks written in managed code :)

re: Installer Hell

Mark — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:12:11 GMT

btw - for anyone stuck on this, I figured out how to get around this error. Either add a file () under the lowest nested directory, or add a with the same name under the component. e.g. either one of these: I think the error is related to needing to declare an empty directory verbosely.

re: Installer Hell

Mark — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:23:06 GMT

Ha - I've gone through the same loop! So... can anyone help with this problem? Anyone??? Bueller???

re: Installer Hell

Morten Lerudjordet — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:41:40 GMT

So, :smile: Was doing the google thing trying to figure out what the ICE18 in my WiX setup project could be, lo and behold I end up here. The problem is that there are noe other good options out there if one want's to have control over the installer prosess. But it's a real pain in the proverbial behind figuring all this stuff. So good luck to you also!

re: Installer Hell

Sam Piper — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 02:29:16 GMT

I'm going through exactly the same thing at the moment and I understand your pain. I definitely agree that Microsoft missed the boat with MSBuild by not specifying both solutions and projects with a unified structure, and not supporting setup projects - it's simply not as good as it needs to be, but I have faith that they will resolve these issues some time in the future as everyone is complaining about this. I'm not even bothering with WiX yet! My solution to the setup project problem has been to use CruiseControl.NET with NAnt for continuous integration, using MSBuild to clean, build the projects in a solution, and run unit tests using the fail-fast strategy. Setup projects are built using a daily process in CC that uses NAnt and devenv to clean, build, and deploy to an integration environment. I haven't encountered a situation where I needed to hack the setup project files though - I think this is because the build machine mirrors the developers machine in every way, including file paths. So it works pretty well with no really bad smells. I'm not sure what your gripes with NAnt are though - you say it fails miserably but you don't give any real reason why. We're still using it very successfully to do everything we need, and where the out-of-boxness is not what we want, we write our own tool and plug it in - NAnt is really just a harness. Check out Sandcastle if you aren't already aware of it - that's the MS version of NDoc, but there's no GUI.

re: Those pesky temp files

Pieter — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 22:52:19 GMT

Great stuff Mark, I just had the need for this type of solution.