Archive for April, 2006
Hmm. Here's hoping it runs better than it installs
Apr 27th
Finished up my sessions here at the MySQL Users Conference and decided I
would take a moment to install the freshly minted RC1 of Windows Power
Shell. <pause while booming voice resonates/>
I had Monad beta 2 on this laptop so the installer politely told me I had to
remove that first. No problem. Uh, well. There is a
problem. Monad beta 2 on this machine was the first beta 2 shipped that
was built against .NET beta 2. I’ve since removed that and upgraded to
Visual Studio 2005 and the RTM version of .NET 2.0. The uninstaller
quickly alerted me to this fact and declared flatly that it could not remove
it.
Not really wanting to uninstall VS 2005 and reinstall .NET beta 2, I played
around with editing my machine.config to get the uninstaller happy. After
several failed attempts, I simply decided to blast the monad install folder and
rip out the registry key. I checked the GAC and saw no signs of MSH in
there so maybe I’m safe. Proceed to install.
Bzzt. About 70% through the installation, the installer declared that
it was having network difficulty reading from msh_setup-i386.msi. There’s
really two problems with that. I’M NOT INSTALLING OVER A NETWORK AND THE
MSI IS NOT NAMED MSH_SETUP_I386.MSI! Sheesh, is it really this hard to
release a product that installs. Holy crap who’s building this
stuff!
So I made a copy of my PowerShell-i386.msi installer and named it
msh_setup-i386.msi. The installation of PowerShell completed successfully
then. I hope. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Pretty interesting read
Apr 26th
This article brings up
some good points related to supporting an OS from an OEM
perspective.
Repeat after me: decouple, decouple, decouple
Apr 25th
Just saw the post on /. about the release of PowerShell RC1. Exciting
but then I read this:
“PS won’t be shipped with Vista or Windows Server 2007 but it will debut
with Exchange 12.”
Huh? PowerShell will ship with Exchange? Ok, I understand that
Microsoft has to sell products to stay in business but they could still sell
Windows, Office, Exchange, and all their other products while decoupling major
components such as Explorer, Internet Explorer, PowerShell, and several
others. By decoupling these, it does several things not the least of which
is forcing their devs to develop more rigid interfaces between the components
and allowing Microsoft to ship these components on a schedule different than the
base products.
Who among us would not love to have a shell circa 2006 instead of the crappy
Windows explorer we have now?
What’s next? The only way to get the HD-DVD addon for XBox360 is to buy
Biztalk 2007?
VSIP goodnes
Apr 25th
I’m working on a Visual Studio package for MySQL and discovering that it is
possible to write hundreds of pages of documentation and still not be able to
answer some of the most basic questions. Microsoft does it over and over
again.
In this case I’m using managed code to create a custom editor for our
database objects (think Server Explorer). I don’t want to register a file
extension. After considerable trial and error, I got a chunk of code
working. This code called IVsUIShellOpenDocument.InitializeEditorInstance
and IVsUIShell.CreateDocumentWindow and my editor appeared. However, it
would not prompt to save when the window pane was closed. GetDocumentInfo
showed an edit lock on my document but UnlockDocument could not remove it.
I replaced this code with simpler code that called
IVsUIShellOpenDocument.OpenSpecificEditor and my documents suddenly started
prompting to save properly. I had wanted to avoid going this route because
it requires an editor factory class that I thought was unnecessary. Oh
well. Unnecessary working code is better than sleek busted
code.
Heading to the UC
Apr 23rd
In a few hours, I’ll hop a plane to Santa Clara for the 2006 MySQL Users
Conference. There will be many great MySQL people so I’m sure there will
be excellent blog coverage the entire week. I’ll try to post a few
thoughts myself.
Oh, and in case anyone missed it, the Visual Express products are now free
permanently. On Windows, I expect Visual C++ Express to be the preferred
“free” tool for building MySQL. As of right now, we build MySQL on Windows
using Visual Studio 2003.