I’ve had the good fortune to work on several agile software-development teams over the years. If you’ve ever hated having software you’ve developed sit on the shelf for months or years until the next release, shipping several times a year feels good. Shipping almost every month is even better. Shipping almost every week is phenomenal. [...]
Reggie Burnett, creator and developer of MySQL’s Connector/NET ADO.NET provider, announced an alpha release of the MySQL Connector/NET. Among the new features: Perfmon counters are now created using Wix code instead of a managed custom action. This seems to help the problem where some installation were failing becausing of being unable to register the counters. [...]
I was working on my current double-secret project at work and got a requirement that I knew would need a custom action. The requirement is to add entries to a configuration file without overwriting existing entries. The configuration file (scenery.cfg, for FlightSim fans) is actually in .ini format. Naturally, I looked into using the standard [...]
Apple’s Safari browser is now available in public beta on Windows. A little spelunking shows that it uses Windows Installer packages and that they’re built with WiX. Sadly, they didn’t use WixUI.<g> On a more serious-but-sad note, the packages have ICE validation errors (other than the typical ones), contain VBScript custom actions, and the main [...]
As everyone knows, script custom actions are inherently evil. A security addition to Windows Installer 4.0 in Windows Vista means that script CAs are even more likely to fail; see Heath’s blog entry on the issue and Aaron’s follow-up. But did you know that script CAs, evil that they are, nonetheless ship in Orca, MsiVal2, [...]