Setup

robmen now entering blogspace.

What does one say when one shows up late to a party where everyone else seems to be happily chatting away at each other? Hello? How are you doing? This is quite a nice rug don't you think? Something of a medium shag, I do believe.

(if you’ve never seen Henry Rollins on his spoken-word shows, I highly suggest finding the next show nearest you and going).

Since I am a bit late to this blog party, let me do a formal introduction of myself. As per the title of this web log, my name is Rob Mensching and I am a Software Design Engineer (aka developer, programmer, coder, writer of many things cryptic, etc.) at Microsoft. I've been with the company for a bit over four years now and most of that time was spent on the Office setup/deployment team beating the Windows Installer (aka MSI or Darwin) into submission. I recently moved to the Windows Server organization to work on what has since been named Dynamic Systems Initiative.

Before I was hired as a "full timer" I was an intern on the Windows Installer team. There I acted as the "unofficial tools team" for Darwin and created things such as msifiler.exe, msival2.exe, orca.exe, and wrote the original Merge Module (aka MSM) specification and merge API (mergemod.dll). That internship was an amazing eight month sabbatical from my computer science undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri - Rolla and basically set the stage for my career to date.

So there is a bit context to base this blog on. From here I plan to launch on several forays into the dark art known to many as "setup". There aren't many people out there talking about setup so I hope to provide some in-depth insight into the domain. But right now, sleep calls. Good night.