Rob Mensching's Blog - page 35

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.

I've been working my way through the book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs that Peter Torr left behind when he moved out (when I got married). The book is a bit sensationalistic so I'm constantly questioning how much of it is really real but there are parts that I find amusing. This particular passage sticks out in my mind that talks about Steve Jobs's amazing ability to sell.

Last week I added a somewhat cool feature to the WiX toolset (v3-only, of course). I call the feature "smart cabbing". I didn't actually invent the feature, somebody in Visual Studio came up with the idea for VS2003's setup (I think). The idea is actually quite simple, "If you have to put the same file into the same cabinet but with different names, do not duplicate the binary content."

When I first tripped across this blog entry about using Windows Work Flow to generate .wxs files, I thought it was written by Clemens Vasters. That surprised me because I imagined (having never actually met him) Clemens as being a guy that would grasp data models really well and that blog entry missed a very important distinction in the data model differences between work flow and the WiX toolset. Well, as you can see from the two links that the blog entry was written by a different Clemens.

A while ago, I saw this blog post about creating an uninstall shortcut using the WiX toolset. My first reaction was, "Uhh, I thought the Logo says you're not supposed to create uninstall shortcuts." But as the blog author noted clients are clients (especially if they are paying the bills). My second reaction to the blog entry was, "Jeez, those CustomActions don't seem like they should be necessary."

The last couple days have been just draining. Actually, the last few weeks have been draining. Lots of communicating but not lots of action. Lack of action means lack of progress. Lack of progress despite lots of energy expenditure means draining.