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.