Rob Mensching's Blog - page 29

WiX

Call it WiX v2 "SP1".

At the beginning of the year we declared the WiX v2 toolset stable. It was a great feeling to finally have something we could point people to when they asked for a WiX toolset that was under constant development. Back then I noted that we would release new drops of WiX v2 when bad enough bugs or big enough changes showed up to warrant it.

Personal

More red UI!

After years of being blue, Soma announced that MSDN has finally gone red.

Back in early 2003, I was learning C# by rewriting WiX v1, which was tens of thousands of lines of VBScript, to create WiX v2. At the same time, Jason Ginchereau was experimenting with C# to create a managed library to interface with the Windows Installer API.

Every once in a while I make a mistake where I know I did something wrong but cannot pinpoint the exact problem. These are the worse kind of mistakes because I don't know what I need to learn to avoid repeating the mistake. As a result I often back away from the problem even though leaving the issue un-addressed may be yet another mistake.

Personal

Weekend down time.

I forgot to mention last week that my blog was going to be down over the weekend. I'm on a free ISP so I don't complain when they say, "We're going to go down over the weekend to upgrade the electrical system in our building. Your email will be cached and sent when we come back up Monday."

A couple weeks ago I posted a blog entry that I had mentally labeled "the lead balloon experiment" even before I finished. In that entry, I asked the question, "Should consistent inflammatory remarks be ignored or is it important to address the remarks to present the other side of the issue and attempt to debate the underlying issues?" I got some great feedback and wanted to roll it up here.

Like almost all Thursday nights, I was out with the guys writing code for the WiX toolset. Also, like almost all Thursday nights, Jenny called me before she headed off to bed. Sadly, tonight she informed me that her Zune had frozen on her walk to work this morning.