Moving Day...

It's been soooo long since I've posted, I'm not sure if anyone is still subscribed or not, but just in case...

I've decided to move my blog to a new home where I am going to be spending a lot of time in the future.  Stop by and say hi!

http://blog.xambi.com

C ya...

DeployNow.com and "Smoke"

I’ve had a lot of people asking me lately what has become of the DeployNow.com site and more importantly, about Smoke – my Windows Installer validation tool.

As enthusiastic as I was about building a community site for installation developers, the idea just didn’t take off on it’s own, and I just don’t have the time to invest in it right now.  The domain expired a while back and I just never bothered to renew it.  I just paid the renewal fee a few minutes ago, so it should be back online in a day or two, but please don’t expect any updates or new content anytime soon.

In the meantime, you also fine Smoke here.

In Memory of Zach

Last Wedenesday, Amanda and I got the phone call that everyone dreads.  The details were vague and sketchy, but in a shaky and uncertain voice, my Mother-In-Law informed us that my Brother-In-Law Zach had been in an accident and she needed to go with the police to identify his body.

Zach and two of his friends, Chance and Andy were speeding down a back road in Loganville when Zach lost control of the car and struck a tree.  All three boys were killed instantly.  The car was destroyed to the point that they were unable to determine the make and model of the car.

Friends and family converged on Loganville from all around the country over the next few days while the family fielded a non-stop stream of phone calls and visitors.  The outpouring of support and love for our entire family is something I still cannot begin to describe.

All three of my kids loved Zach dearly and saw him almost daily.  Breaking the news to them and helping them through the last 5 days has been really tough.  Each accepted it in their own way, but the most heart-breaking was my youngest daughter Gabi who kept saying “It's ok.  We won't forget Uncle Zach because we have pictures of him.“  She tried so hard to console everyone and try to make them feel better.  It was really touching...

Zach’s funeral service was held on Saturday to a crowd of family and friends so large that some people could not even get in to the chapel and had to listen from the hallways outside.  While Garth Brooks’ “The Dance” played, the overwhelming sound of sniffling and sobbing said more than anyone’s words possibly could have.  After some touching words from his friends, I took the opportunity to speak about my first memories of Zach, walking hand-in-hand with him through Opryland when he was just a little kid.  I spoke about how it was clear to me that while he had been robbed of so many things life has to offer it was clear to me that the one thing there was no shortage of in his life was the love of an enormous number of friends and family.  I thanked everyone on behalf of the family for filling his short life with so much love.

Rest In Peace Zach, Andy and Chance    

Guru.com & Dispute Resolution

If you’ve been following along, I am trying to recover some money that I paid for web design work that I ultimately learned had been stolen from http://www.creative.com by Shayna McCullough under the name of a non-existent company called Iconic Media.

Early on in the process, I went to guru.com which is where the transaction took place, hoping that they had some policies in place to protect me under these circumstances.  I search ed all over the place and couldn’t really find anything, so I eventually ended up scouring their terms of service.  I was disappointed to see how vigorously they position themselves as a provider of payment services.  I guess I understand this in a way since they really don’t have any control over who does what when it comes to actually executing these projects, but it does seem that a basic tenant of their service is to provide some insulation and protection should thing go bad.

I did not get guru involved in this early enough, I guess because I just didn’t think they would offer any help.  I was wrong to have made that assumption, and while this is not yet resolved, I think their actions thus far are commendable and I’d like to thank them for the effort they have already expended.

Within a couple of hours of filing my complaint on their website, I received a fairly lengthy reply that was organized and well thought out.  This wasn’t the kind of template based reply you might expect, but a couple hundred words that dealt specifically with this case and the people involved.  The message described exactly what they would do to try to resolve the matter, and what my options were if they were not successful.  They asked for more information, which I supplied to them, and they followed up again to let me know exactly what they were planning to do.

I have not heard what the outcome of those efforts were yet, but I am really impressed by the sincerity with which they are pursuing this.  I still don’t know if I’ll hire anyone off guru.com again or not, but I do feel a lot better knowing that they do care.

I think the lesson here is that it is always better to try to get someone to help you than to just conclude based on the their legal mumbo jumbo that you are all alone in these kinds of matters.

Business Fraud Alert!

A few months agao, I contracted a “company” that goes by the name “Iconic Media” through http://www.guru.com to design a new site for an eCommerce project of mine which was to be launched at http://www.xambi.com.  A woman named Shayna McCollough was the one and only person from this outfit with whom I have dealt with.  After paying her $2000.00 and investing significant amounts of time in waiting for a design, she finally delivered what I initially believed to be a decent design.  After having a few peers review the design, it was brought to my attention that the design was an exact rip-off of http://www.creative.com.  When approached about this flagrant theft, Ms. McCollough mysteriously disappeared and has not been heard from since.

Please be aware that this work was contracted through Guru.com which portrays itself as a safe intermediary between companies and contractors, yet has done absolutely nothing to help us resolve this situation.

At all costs, please avoid using this company and if you are so inclined, drop Ms. McCollough an email of better yet, a phone call and let her know what you think of her dishonest, if not criminal acts.  Here is all the info I have:

http://www.iconic.cc

Shayna McCollough
smccullough@iconic.cc
Phone: (727) 507-0424
Fax: (310) 388-5747

A whois search turned this up:

Registrant:
   Iconic, Inc.

   468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 200
   Beverly Hills, California 90210
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
   Domain Name: ICONIC.CC
      Created on: 26-Oct-03
      Expires on: 26-Oct-05
      Last Updated on: 19-Oct-04

   Administrative Contact:
      Manager, Domain  info@gmi.cc
      Iconic, Inc.
      468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 200
      Beverly Hills, California 90210
      United States
      8882888135      Fax -- 8882888135
   Technical Contact:
      Manager, Domain  info@gmi.cc
      Iconic, Inc.
      468 N. Camden Drive, Suite 200
      Beverly Hills, California 90210
      United States
      8882888135      Fax -- 8882888135

   Domain servers in listed order:
      NS1.IDX.NET
      NS2.IDX.NET

A google search on that address revealed a plethora of businesses using the same address, which would seem to suggest that it is a mail drop of some sort.

A State of California Corporate Search turned this up:

Washing my hands...

So, after all that ruckus with Rob Mensching about COM Advertising from before Christmas, and my sincere gesture to clear the air, it seems that nothing is really resolved after all.

Just before I posted my very nice attempt at clearing the air, I put together a little sample that exactly duplicated the scenario Rob gave me under which COM Advertising had the alleged ‘bugs’ or ‘wonky’ behavior.  Of course, no matter how hard I tried, I could not break COM Advertising or even come close to reproducing the behavior Rob described.  It worked perfectly every time in every scenario I threw at it.  I wanted to clear the air between Rob and I, but wasn’t and never have been willing to concede that there was a bug there unless Rob could tell me what the bug was.  Of course he never did, so I very thoroughly documented my test rig and the scenarios I threw at it, and emailed it to him for him to comment on.  I told him I wanted to clear the air and would be posting an apology to that end, and asked that he either show me the alleged bug(s) or concede (publicly) that there are no bugs in COM Advertising.  It’s been almost three weeks now, and I’ve never heard from him again.  At first, I thought he was working like a mad-man trying to create some bizarre scenario in which it would break, but eventually I concluded that when faced with irrefutable evidence against his position, he just decides he’s too busy to back up his allegations.  This is not the first time, but actually the second time.  The first was over some bogus comments he made about using INSTALLDIR instead of TARGETDIR, but that’s a story for another day…

So, while I wish him and the WiX project well, I am done with him.  He lost my respect through this episode, and in my opinion is a poor reflection on Microsoft’s integrity.

I’ll be working on an update to smoke sometime this week, then be posting the source code for anyone who is interested in using it.

Setting things right...

The last few days have been pretty interesting around the WiX Toolkit community, and I guess I’ve been the catalyst for most of the commotion.  A lot of folks have been following along as I publicly aired by feelings about some of Rob Mensching’s comments on COM Advertising,  but what you may not know is that Rob and I have also been exchanging some very lengthy emails offline.  In spite of what you may have seen publicly, our offline emails have been anything but a shouting match.  We both shared our feelings on a number of issues that we were both concerned about and I think we both benefited from the exchange by learning about each other and how to interact with the community.  I’m writing today to own up for my mistakes and set things right.

My comments through this whole thing have been motivated SOLELY by my passion for Windows Installer and deployment technology in general.  I have committed myself to this segment of software development and that commitment has been both a blessing and also an enormous curse for me personally.  The result of everything that I’ve been through is that sometimes I tackle things a bit too aggressively.  So, while I adamantly insist that both my intentions and arguments were honest and correct, I recognize now that my demeanor and mannerisms were easily perceived as being brash and abrasive.  For that, and that alone, I extend my sincere apologies to Rob, and to anyone else following along who may have felt insulted by my words.  I do see now that I might have been able to achieve my goal of making this an important issue without resorting to “shock” value to get people’s attention.

I’m happy to be putting this behind us, and look forward to working with Rob and everyone else in a much more productive (but less exciting) fashion in the future!

Oh – and by the way – I realize that the underlying issue of COM Advertising may still be a question in some of your minds, so I think you can expect to hear more on the topic from either Rob or myself very soon! ;-)

Doh! - My Secret Agenda Revealed...

Ha! Ha!  Thanks for the laugh Justin!

Seriously now.  How anyone can come to the conclusion I have a secret agenda to promote some other product when I am in the process of contributing smoke, and fighting hard to keep features working with WiX Toolkit is a mystery to me, but I guess stranger things have happened…

For the Record:
I have NO AFFILIATION with any company anywhere.  I am NOT pimpin’ any commercial product, and frankly, even if someone wanted to pay me to evangelize their product, I don’t think they could afford me (but they are welcome to try!).  I’ve got big plans for the future and a great relationship with industry leaders like Wise and InstallShield.  I may do work for them from time to time, but the only agenda I am pushing is my own, and there is certainly nothing sinister about that...

COM Advertising Support in Windows Installer

Yesterday I mentioned some discussion on the WiX Toolkit mailing list about the use of COM Advertising support and the challenges that go along with it.  Rob Mensching argued that the tables which enable this functionality should be avoided due to some “strange behavior” that he has seen.  I pressed him for more information, pointing out that most of the 43 merge modules that you can get here and the MSXML, SOAP, FoxPro, and Crystal Reports Merge Modules all use this technique without any problems whatsoever.  Additionally, Office 2003 makes extensive use of this feature, so I really wanted to know what was driving Rob to make such a statement.

Rob followed up today with a vague reference to some bizarre scenario where if you install Office XP and the Speech Control Panel Applet in a particular order, a repair would occur the next time you launched the Speech Control Panel applet.  While I appreciate Rob’s follow-up, I am disappointed as it does nothing to explain what the specific problem was and why this scenario proves that COM Advertising is fatally flawed.  Based on what he said, it sounds like a one-time repair that is required to get Office and the Speech API in synch.  While having to dig for your Office CD is a bit of a bummer, it does not sound like that outrageous of a scenario to me.  For what it’s worth, my searches of the Knowledge Base did not turn up any results that seem to describe this problem.

We have to move on, so I wanted to post these as my final thoughts on this issue:

• Rob is a Microsoft employee with strong ties to the Office and Windows Installer team.  If his assertions are correct, why didn’t the Windows Installer team deprecate the use of these tables in Windows Installer 3.0?  Why does Microsoft continue to advocate the use of these tables in the Windows Installer docs?  Why can’t he cite a specific technical problem that supports his position?  Why is there not a single Knowledge Base article that even mentions this problem?
• WiX supports authoring <Class/>, <TypeLib/>, and <ProgId/> elements which should be built into the Class, TypeLib and ProgId tables respectively.  In spite of you specifically authoring these elements, WiX will ignore your intentions and dump the data into the registry table instead.  WTF?  I mean, come on.  If you want to make your own personal and unsubstantiated assertions that COM Advertising if fatally flawed, then fine.  That is your opinion, but why the hell would you make WiX ignore what the author obviously intended?  Wouldn’t it have been better to not even include (or remove) these elements?  At least then you would not be deceiving authors…
• COM Advertising is a really important part of the application resiliency that Windows Installer delivers.  There are very few “entry points” that will cause Windows Installer to check the integrity of your application.  Shortcuts and file associations are the most common, but may apps don’t have those.  What about services?  What about Web Apps?  What about Web Services?  What about background apps that start with windows?  What about apps that are programmatically started by another app?  COM Advertising support is the ONLY entry point that Windows Installer can use to try and keep those apps in a properly installed and configured state.  Selling out and simply writing off this feature is a really bad idea at it’s face value alone, but doing that when you can’t even make a half-assed reasonable case for why you are doing it is – well – ridiculous…  If there is a problem, let’s identify and document it.  Let’s educate WiX authors on how to avoid that problem.  Let’s work with the Windows Installer team to get it fixed.  I know those guys, and I know if it’s broke, they’ll want to fix it.
• Decisions like the one used in tallow’s implementation are self-defeating.  Basically the approach is to dump all of the COM registration data into the Registry table.  Unless by some stroke of luck, your install just happens to install the file to the exact same location as an existing version, the net result is that when your component is installed, it will overwrite previous data in the registry, making the COM subsystem use whatever version of the COM server you’ve installed, even if it is an OLDER version.  Given that Microsoft doesn’t let you dump shared components into System32 anymore, there is not a clear or consistent story around what to do with shared components.  Most people just dump them into their app folder or \bin folder.  Using tallow output, there is no legacy reference counting, no checking the registry to see if a newer version is currently installed elsewhere, no intelligence whatsoever…  If you are thinking that through this behavior, WiX is taking us right back to the DLL-hell we all have grown to hate, you are exactly right!
• What exactly is the benefit of using tallow?  Why not just add the file and have it self-register?  I mean the only tangible benefit of tallow I can dream up is that if a rollback occurs, the registry data won’t be written (you can’t rollback a call to DllRegisterServer).  Anyone can dump a bunch of crap blindly into the registry table.  Isn’t the value of an installation tool to do the hard work for us?

In conclusion, Microsoft competitors are hard at work on intelligent application deployment and management solutions.  In many respects, their work is inspired by the powerful features of Windows Installer.  We, as developers and deployment advocates, owe it to the Windows Platform to do our part to make Windows Installer work the way it was intended.  To educate developers on how to properly use it.  To work with the Windows Installer team to improve and refine it.  Not to sell out on the vision cause it’s too much work or because you don’t understand it.

That is what I call fighting the good fight for setup!

I'm a pain in the WiX ;-)

I’m getting beat up a little bit on the WiX Toolkit mailing lists.  L  It seems that since I’ve been questioning some issues (here and here), and now Rob and Orion think I’m on a war-path.  They’ve got me all wrong.  I’ve given tons of time to helping other people solve their problems and it would be completely out of character for me to try to undermine everything I’ve done by being obnoxious for no reason.  I tend to write passionately and in a very “animated” sort of way.  I guess sometimes that comes off like a rant or something, but it’s not intended that way.

Anyway, this got me thinking about what it means to run or be a part of an open source project.

Pride has got to be a serious factor for Rob.  I mean, he wrote this thing all by himself and obviously poured his heart and soul into it.  Freely and openly sharing something that cost you so much time and energy is hard enough with out someone like me coming along and being critical of your implementation decisions.  I know how hard it is to make those critical decisions along the way.  ActiveInstall was nearly a half-million lines of code and I can’t begin to count the number of nights I spent staring at the ceiling while trying to make key decisions.  At the end of the day, you just have to make the best decisions you can, and be prepared to deal with the fallout if you are wrong.  And sometimes you are wrong.  I made mistakes, and I suspect Rob has too.

I hope that Rob will come to think of it more like this:

What he did all by himself is excellent!  It’s a stellar piece of work for sure.  But now, by opening it up for all to see and scrutinize, it can get even better.  There’s three ways that can happen:

1. Bug identification and fixes through normal usage
2. Enhancement or contributions from the community (think smoke)
3. Revision/Refactoring driven by public scrutiny

It’s number three that is the most intriguing to me today.  The first two are no brainers, but the third is less obvious, yet much more profound in my opinion.  It may be painful at first to hear criticism or to have someone challenge what you say, or the decisions you made, but isn’t that the true (or hidden) power of open-source?  In my opinion, the real value is not that people can find bugs in your source code, or that like minded people will contribute new code to it, it is that the best and brightest minds around can join in and question everything!  The host should encourage discussion and yes – even debates over features and implementation decisions.  This only serves to either improve the product or validate the decisions that have already been made.

While I really don’t want to be viewed as a trouble-maker, I’m gonna keep on doing what I’ve been doing.  Why?  Because I care.  Because I like WiX and want to see it grow and mature.  Because I want to be a part of it’s success. 

‘Nuff said! 

Implementing a Windows Installer Validation Engine in VB6 - Part II

A while back, I posted a code sample on my blog that demonstrated how to implement MsiSetExternalUI in VB6.  That post certainly got a lot of hits, but there was a catch that quickly came back to haunt me.  The sample I provided worked like a champ in the VB6 IDE, but caused your app to crash when it was compiled.  I promised to provide an update, and while it is pretty late, here it is!

http://www.DeployNow.com/Articles/Details.aspx?ID=3

Smoke - Windows Installer Validation Tool (Download)

The Windows Installer validation tool I’ve been babbling about for a few days now is available for download on DeployNow!  Stop by and check it out:

http://www.deploynow.com/Articles/Details.aspx?ID=2

I’ve even enhanced it a bit more to allow for either delimited text output, or xml.

Included in the zip file is a sample batch file that shows how conditional logic can be applied based on smoke’s return value to take alternative courses of action if problems creep into your msi files.

Enjoy – and make sure you link to it, blog about it, and give me some feedback on it!

Joel -- Over the Top???

It seems Joel on Software is really showing his true colors with his shallow and horribly ignorant comments about independent consultants.  Thankfully Christopher Hawkins has set him straight.

I'll have to take a few minutes to relate my experiences regarding Joel on Customer Service sometime...

DeployNow Update Coming Soon

I've been working on a long-overdue update to DeployNow.  If you don't already know, DeployNow is my deployment resource site.  I came up with the idea a long time ago, but have just been waaaay too busy to really do much with it.  Now that I am settling into a groove, I am ready to start packing it with cool stuff!

Stay tuned!

MSN Toolbar Suite Needs Validation!

Rob Mensching noticed that the MSN Toolbar Suite's installer was built with WiX.  He goes on to admit he was upset to see some “non-ideal” authoring in their .msi file.

Hmmm...  If only they had an easy way to incorporate validation of their msi file into their build process...

;-)

UPDATE:  Sorry for mangling your name Rob...  Fixed!

My Windows Installer Validation Tool...

I was working on one my next MSDN articles (hint, hint), which deals with writing a custom validation engine for Windows Installer packages (*.msi files), when I had the brilliant idea of going a step further and implementing it as a command line app which could be used with the WiX toolset.  It’s working like a champ now, but I’m not quite ready to release it.  I’d like to solicit some feedback from anyone who’s interested in this sort of tool!

So, here’s what I have so far:

• Command Line executable
• Outputs XML to stdout (it assumes you’ll redirect to a file, then do something with it)
• Allows you to suppress “info” messages
• Allows you to suppress “warning” messages
• Allows you to use custom *.cub files
• Works for Merge Modules
• Free of course! ;-)

 So – would this sort of thing be useful for you?  What else would you like to see it do?

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them!

BTW, I named it smoke.exe.  Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.  “Smoke test”…  Get it?  Got a better name?

UPDATE:  So, I posted this to the WiX mailing lists as well, thinking those guys would have some good ideas or words of encouragement.  What do I get?  Cracks about Orca and MsiVal2 as though I did not know they existed...  Sheesh...

I'll repeat here what I said there (basically):

Orca does validation, but not from the command line

MsiVal2 does validation from the commandline, but not in a useful way

The idea here is a command line tool that you can integrate into automated build processes.  For example, you could:

• Transform the XML into a nice html report
• Flag the build as being bad if an errors creeps into your msi
• Use XSL to filter out noise
• Check the return value and take action or bail out
• Extend the source code to do whatever the heck you want

Of course, neither Orca or MsiVal2 can do any of that... 

Seriously, I would have expected people involved in open source development to embrace new ideas and people interested in contributing...  Besides, if the mere existance of another tool mitigates the need for something newer, better or cooler, then what the heck are they doing?  I guess they forgot about MsiDb.exe, MsiFiler.exe, MsiMerge.exe...

But whatever...  To be honest, I'm not that surprised.  I drafted a post a while back on their plans to write an authoring tool, but it was pretty critical, so I opted not to post it.  Maybe I'll reconsider...

Anyway, I think it's cool, and I'm already using it on a client project...  If you want to check it out, just drop me a line!

Windows Installer 3.0 Redist Now Available

Microsoft has finally released the redistributable for Windows Installer 3.0!

You can get the download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5FBC5470-B259-4733-A914-A956122E08E8&displaylang=en

And read the KB article here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=884016

Cool Christmas animation from Red-Gate

My friends at Red-Gate are getting ready to launch a really clever Christmas animation.  It’s a high-tech play on the classic scrooge Christmas tale.  Check it out:

http://www.red-gate.com/downloads/cc_final.html

Provider Model WebCast Fun!

Wow!  Robert McLaws and Jeff Julian just wrapped up their WebCast: “Provider Model: The Flexible Design Pattern of ASP.NET 2.0”.

Not only was it a great presentation, but two really cool new things also were announced:

1. Robert announced that InterScape is releasing a Provider Model framework for .NET 1.1.  This is awesome because it will allow us to start building Providers today.  When .NET 2.0 is released, all we’ll have to do is modify our classes to inherit from the 2.0 Provider Model instead of the Interscape framework.  Way Cool!
2. Robert has a great vision for the Provider Model and really wants to see people adopt it.  To support this, he has announced the launch of http://www.providermodel.com.  This site is a community resource where you can collaborate with others, browse a gallery of providers, and read provider-related blogs.  Again – Way Cool!

Robert & Julian – Great Job!

MSN Music Customer Service

So – I was searching out some new music on MSN Music today with WMP10.  I did a quick search for Smile Empty Soul, and of course found the album right away.  The problem is that what I got was sort of like some search results.  It had two albums displayed near the bottom with identical images and I (incorrectly) assumed that it was a duplicate search result.  I quickly clicked the first one, skimmed over the album details to ensure it was what I wanted and clicked the “Buy Album” button.

The problem is that the one I bought is the edited version.  I realize now that the first one I saw which I thought was a duplicate was the one with the explicit lyrics.

While I was really irritated with myself for failing to notice the difference, I was also iriitated with MSN Music for not marking the album more clearly as being an edited version.  I’m not one who usually has great luck with customer service, but I figured it was at least worth filing my complaint.  On clicking around for a minute or two, I found an option to chat with the MSN Music support folks.  Feeling brave, I gave it a shot.

I filled out a short form explaining my problem and click the “Chat” button.  In about 4 seconds, I was connected with a support rep named Sha-Sha.  She echoed my beef back to me to be sure she understood.  Once I confirmed that she had it right, she had me wait while she updated the support ticket with my issue and sent to their content team.  To my utter amazement, she then told me she had credited my account the 8.91 the album had cost me so I could go buy the new one.

The whole process took less than 5 minutes!  Maybe I should not be so surprised.  Maybe all support and customer service should all be this good, but the fact of the matter is that it’s not.  In my opinion, MSN Music’s support is top notch!

Congrats on doing a fantastic job MSN!

BTW, Breaking Benjamin just showed up on MSN in the last few days.  If you like Good Charlotte and Three Days Grace, definitely check these guys out!