Thanks for those words of wisdom :)
On 3/19/07, Wilson, Phil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I understand, and it wasn't meant as a criticism. It just seems to be a
common story that some developer on the team with some set of skills
will be pressed into service as the setup guy with a different skill set
requirement. Occasionally people are surprised by that difference. Setup
is just copying files, right??? How hard can it be? But you
volunteered, so good, and welcome to the setup club. You'll probably run
into other areas where setups require a different way of thinking. (One
model is that you should write setups as if you're updating the
company's payroll database with no backup to correct it if you fnd out
you did it wrong when it's all over.) Also, C++ will always be useful,
so if you're just starting out I'd certainly recommend you learning it
(include managed C++ too) because you'll stand out from all those guys
who only have C#.
Phil Wilson
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dhaval
Patel
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 4:20 PM
To: Levi Wilson
Cc: Danish Waheed; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] C# .dll
Phil: My PM and all the senior engineers who interviewed me, hired me on
the basis of my C# skills. I was the one who started packaging my
company's deployment packages using WIX - all (and I mean ALL) the folks
in my company still use XCopy and batch files. I raised this issue
(calling C# .dlls from WIX) because it is something that seems eminent
and invigorating. I like learning newer technologies and I ended up
learning WIX myself, not because my superiors 'forced it upon me' (they
are least interested in such issues anyway :)) or because it was a core
requirement. I just like my packages to be deployed in an 'orderly'
manner and what better than WIX to do such things!!
That being said, I am not complaining that WIX doesn't support .NET
.dlls - I am merely raising an issue that will be raised by others as
more people start adopting WIX. I have coded in ANSI C (in college, not
exaggerating) for a semester, because I was forced to. Personally I felt
it was horrible, but then I also believed that I couldn't be a
programmer unless I started from the ground up. Of course I could learn
C++, and who knows someday I will, but at this point in time I see
myself as a hardcore C# enthusiast (of course a newbie as far as my
programming skills go!).
Anyway, I just wanted to find out the reasons why this can't happen (at
least for now), and I think Richard made some good points. I completely
overlooked the issue of 'undoing' a custom action, but I was thinking
more on the lines of 'if it is doable in C++, it must be a breeze to
redo it in C#'.
Thanks for all the replies (the issue surely raised a few eyebrows..
hehe).
On 3/19/07, Levi Wilson < [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote:
And C++ will NEVER die.
On 3/19/07, Danish Waheed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote:
I think one of the reasons why Windows Installer does
not have lots of fancy
actions is because they are not generally related to
installation and hence
the support for Custom Actions. You cannot include all
the possible actions
as there are so many types of software and so many
configuration/changes
required, that it is better to leave them to the
developer to write custom
actions for their needs.
Now for .NET Custom Actions, I think it will be cool to
have support for
that, but at the same time, I think vbScript and Jscript
are very easy to
use and learn compared to C++, in case someone does not
want to spend time
on C++. Besides, if you know Object Oriented
Programming, like C#, learning
C++ is not that difficult especially if it is just for
Custom Actions. It
may take a bit extra time for you to write a DLL in the
beginning, but once
it is done, adding more functions to it is very easy.
There are so many
tutorials out there that you can learn from.
I am not a C++ programmer by any means and most of my
coding has been in C#
and Java so I understand where Dhaval is coming from.
But I had to write
custom actions in C++ as it was not an option at several
places I worked at.
So if you like being a setup developer for Windows,
learning C++ will
definitely help you in the longer run.
Now one must avoid using Custom Actions unless it is
really required and is
something that Windows Installer cannot do. But can you
avoid it or not
depends on the software you are writing setup for, I
have seen a lot of
products with more than 50 Custom Actions and all of
them doing something
that Windows Installer cannot do. Once you start
working on complex
software setup, things get messy very easily and the
best way to handle
those Custom Actions is to write Custom Action dll in
C++.
Just my two cents.
Thanks
Danish Waheed
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ] On Behalf Of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 11:44 AM
To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] C# .dll
One other concern in making custom actions in C# (or
anything else) is
that as Rob regularly observes, custom actions are very
difficult to get
right - especially when considering installation failure
(rollback) and
appropriate uninstall operation. Speaking for myself, I
try to avoid
them whenever possible. In fact I think the only custom
actions I
currently have in any of the installations I have
generated relate to
the verification at installation time of a customer
entered license key.
Many people seem to look at custom actions as a way to
do things that
aren't supported by Microsoft Installer itself. While
true, it is also
often true that there is a reason why Microsoft
Installer doesn't
currently contain built-in support for that specific
action.
Regards,
Richard
--- Original message follows ---
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Dhaval
Patel
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 10:45 AM
To: Rob Mensching
Cc: Joe Kaplan; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] C# .dll
"Folks like me," meaning people who have minuscule
experience
programming in VBScript or C++. I pretty much started
learning to
program in C# back in 2002, graduated last year, and am
currently
working as a C#/ASP.NET developer. Of course I could
embark on a journey
to learn C++, but I think the rest of the world is
moving to .NET,
especially with the advent of C# 3.0 (LINQ), CLR 3.5,
etc. I rather
spend time on exploring new features of C# 3.0 and CLR
3.5.
I am still a WIX newbie by any means - I hope I didn't
offend you by
saying 'people like me' :) In essence what I was trying
to say is that
folks who excel in C# will be able to exploit WIX's
features to a
greater extent. Plus I think if this happens, many
developers will start
adopting WIX right away. I still have a few colleagues
who don't want to
use just because they can't pass values read from a WIX
User dialog to a
C# .dll. One (hypothetical) example most people would
put this
functionality to use is writing their own custom SQL
connection strings
using the SqlConnectionStringBuilder.
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