Blogs|Dec 10, 2007

Cumulative Patching with WiX 2.0

Sometimes I wonder if Windows Installer will be the death of me. While I’ve successfully shipped device drivers, debuggers, and all sorts of bizarre products, I have to say that trying to get something installed on Windows is one of the more frustrating things I have encountered in my career. I can’t be the only…
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Blogs|Dec 2, 2007

MSBuild Debuggers!

It looks like I’m not the only one who wanted a debugger for MSBuild projects. When the MSBuild team asked everyone to spend $100 to prioritize features, the runaway winner was a debugger. Reading the comments to my original post (as well as the MSBuild team’s posts), Partho Das from Microsoft has released a Visual…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 2, 2007

PARAFFIN 1.02 – Numerous Bug Fixes

Very special thanks to Darren Stone for reporting several bugs and suggestions for PARAFFIN, my tool for assisting with maintaining Windows Installer XML (WiX) installations. I’ve posted a fixed version for your enjoyment. Here’s what’s new: Added -Win64 switch, which adds Win64=”yes” to all components. Updated the Id naming to keep all values in the…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 24, 2007

Adding Additional Internal Drives to Vista on a Mac Pro

I’ve written before about installing Vista x64 on a Mac Pro and how it’s the best Windows machine money can buy. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who wanted to beauty, stability, and lack of vendor crapware on my computer as my post is one of the biggest trafficked items on the whole Wintellect…
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Blogs|Nov 21, 2007

Easily Converting to Visual Studio 2008

With VS 2008 being released on Monday, let the project conversions begin! While I wish we could have had a single project and solution format that would have worked between VS 2005 and VS 2008, at least we can use VS 2008 to target .NET 2.0 only projects. Faced with converting about 100 different project…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 19, 2007

Random Notes Taken While Installing VSTS 2008

As everyone on the planet knows, VS 2008 released to manufacturing and is available to MSDN Subscribers and everyone else. Here’s some notes on installing and interesting things I found: If you have VS 2008 RC0 installed, you will need to manually uninstall everything first. Setup crashed on my trying to do a repair install…
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Blogs|Nov 16, 2007

Updated Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications Source Code (3.2.11114.1)

After four or five reports that the SettingsMaster Add-In was failing to create it’s toolbar on some systems, I finally gave up and quit relying on what the Visual Studio documentation says about the ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_UISetup on OnConnection. On some systems it turns out that there is no way in the world that message is sent.…
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Blogs|Nov 11, 2007

MSBuild 3.5 Tips and a Small MSBuild 4.0 Wish List

Earlier this week, I spent some quality time porting a moderately complicated build over to MSBUILD 3.5, the version that comes with Visual Studio 2008. There are numerous new features in MSBUILD 3.5 that are quite interesting, especially the wonderful AdditionalProperties and Properties child elements on ItemGroup elements for MSBuild tasks. Now you can create…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 8, 2007

PARAFFIN 1.01 – Bug Fix for Dashes in Ids

A big thanks to “Loctus” reporting a bug in PARAFFIN.EXE my WiX TALLOW.EXE replacement tool. I was allowing component and directory names to be created with dashes, which Candle does not like. The code is all fixed. Please keep the bug reports coming!
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Blogs|Oct 28, 2007

itoldyouso – An Undocumented WinDBG Extension Command

Aaron Lerch recently wrote about a funny name for an exported function he saw exported from DBGHELP.DLL, itoldyouso. Aaron showed a small section of the Dependency Walker output, which piqued my curiosity. Below is a larger screen shot. Does anything strike you interesting in the exported functions? DBGHELP.DLL has a few documented WinDBG extension commands…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 28, 2007

The Six Its – The Key to Breaking Down Schedules

I’m sure everyone’s already read Joel Spolsky’s excellent discussion of Evidenced Based Scheduling, but if you haven’t you’re missing out. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that scheduling is the hardest part of software. We all got into this business because we like to play with compilers and debuggers, not because we totally…
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Blogs|Oct 21, 2007

WiX: A Better TALLOW – PARAFFIN (Part 3 of 3)

In the first installment of this series I discussed an introduction to WiX. In the second installment, I talked about the issues related to creating .WXS files with TALLOW.EXE and how you have to manually maintain those files by hand, which can be tedious to the extreme. In this final installment, I will present a…
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