Rob Mensching's Blog - page 38

WM

I think I've read about this...

For years I've searched out descriptions of life in a software startups to see how "the other half lives". As many of you know, my entire professional career (going on 8 years) has been at Microsoft. More specifically I've worked in Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft Windows Core. Those groups are probably the very anti-thesis of "software startup".

I've been doing a fair bit of UI programming (more on that later). Kinda' scary to think that they let me write code that draws pretty pictures on the screen. What's even scarier is that I'm actually having a good time with it. I think it has a lot to do with the kick ass designers I work with.

This is a blog entry that I've been trying to find time to write for the last week. Unfortunately, the push for GA-day has been all encompassing.

WM

Windows Vista Countdown Clock

This morning, Jascha (who, sadly, has yet to actually make a public appearance that I can find a link to) sent around a link to a guy who has a funny way of saying that he's looking forward to the Windows Vista release on Windows Marketplace. I'm excited about the near future too.

Today we announced the project that has been keeping me very busy as of late.

This little tip for those of you trying to do a small update or minor upgrade has been sitting in my "to blog" box for a long while. If you are developing a small update or minor upgrade for your MSI product, I encourage you to set the MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES Property to "1".

Setup

Crisis in Y2K7? WTF?

I've been working on revamping the Windows Marketplace build system for the last month or so. Just yesterday I had to make the decision how we were going to version our binaries. Versioning is a very important of software engineering and it can be very disruptive if you get it wrong. Getting versioning right is also quite often overlooked so I was pleasantly surprised to see two pages dedicated to the topic in the help for our build system.

WiX

Drive to a WiX v2 toolset final release.

Tonight the core WiX toolset virtual team made a concerted effort to reduce the number of open WiX v2 bugs.