Rob Mensching's Blog - page 42

I was asked a very good questions in a previous blog entry about the yet to be released toolset, "Will the toolset make it possible to get rid of some expensive install tools if I don't need their sophisticated user interfaces but want to automate all?" I thought this was a question lots of people might start asking so here's a response.

This afternoon I'm running over to the research buildings to hear William Gibson speak about something. Anything. Really, I don't care, anything.

At the end of December I had promised myself that I would not write another blog entry until I posted the "toolset" I mentioned in my last blog entry to a Workspace on GotDotNet.

My parents live in Dubuque, Iowa. Over the holidays it is common for me to make a pilgrimage from my home in Redmond (not far from the main Microsoft campus) to the Midwest. Typically the pilgrimage takes me from SeaTac airport to Chicago O'Hare followed by a short hop to the tiny landing strip at DBQ. This year on the four hour flight to Chicago, I decided to get caught up on a couple things going down in my little corner of the blogosphere.

I've sat down to write this blog no less than four times in the last week. Each time something has come up that has pulled me away from actually getting far enough into writing that it becomes basically self-propelled. Now tonight, I know there is at least one person out there focused on getting her homework done so I thought I'd buckle down and plow through a bit of writing myself.

You always lift him up.

I've been debating with myself for the last week whether I really wanted to write this blog entry about the Component Rules.aspx). The Windows Installer SDK.aspx) has some decent documentation.aspx) about what can go wrong when the rules are broken.

I find the list of referrers to my blog fascinating. Today the referrers list contained several hits from people searching for Orca (or more explicitly orca.exe) on Google. I can only figure that Google snagged one of my earliest blog entries with its reference to orca.exe and was sending people there. Since, I've been in something of a storytelling mood the last couple days I thought I'd go back to 1998 and tell the story of Orca.