Rob Mensching's Blog - page 35

The title of this blog entry is a concept that I kept trying to sneak into one of my earlier posts on this "Zen and the Art of Custom Actions" thread. I finally gave up trying to make it a bullet point and now here we are. What convinced me that there was a full topic to be covered was when I realized I meant two things when I said "Custom actions are (generally/typically) an admission of failure."

Continuing the Zen and the Art of Custom Actions thread, I thought I'd post a mostly formed thought. When I'm presented with the need to write a custom action I often mentally classify the work into one of three or so different buckets.

David Aiken has an interesting blog post about adopting TDD (Test Driven Development, for those of you have been living in a cave) for his next project. In said blog post, David suggests that before even writing tests that one should write the setup logic.

I've never really used SlickEdit but had a few friends that just lived in the editor. Anyway, tonight I tripped across this blog entry that talks out some integration tricks you can do with .wxs files in SlickEdit. If you use SlickEdit and the WiX toolset you might check it out.

I have been asked a great many times to talk about how to create Windows Installer custom actions. Each time I've dismissed the request noting that it would take tons of time to organize my thoughts on the topic and actually write them all down.

So, I apparently took the month of July off from blogging. It wasn't an intentional thing. Time just flew by. I'd say I was busy. And I have been. But a lot of it is just comes from a lack of focus. Today, on this last day of July, that lack of focus will have to end.

I recently discovered that Marc Andreessen (yes, that Marc Andreessen) started blogging earlier this month. He's been on an amazing tear. Pretty much every single blog entry is worth reading from start to finish back to back. Based purely on his writing, I think it would be really fascinating to meet Marc in person.

There were 8 lbs. of M&Ms outside my office yesterday morning. You know what that means. Milestones like this are also good times to sit back and reflect a bit.