I also agree with Dhaval Patel and with Joe Kaplan's observations. No time
soon do I intend to become a C++ elitist.
This has always been something that puzzled me, over the last 22 months:
that the Windows Installer and .NET are on a slightly different course.
I take the point about .NET versions and shell extensions (and I take the
word of others that CAs built in .NET would make the WI go wonky), but I
would expect that increasing complexity of applications and the OS and
platform mix was entirely predictable, and that Clickonce or Xcopy
deployment was not going to make any significant change to that. Or have
they?
It seems to me that there's an increasing interest in WiX for solving some
of the complexity problems.
Ian Thomas
GeoSciSoft - Perth, Australia
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joe Kaplan
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 2:14 PM
To: Dhaval Patel; Wilson, Phil
Cc: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] C# .dll
FWIW, I'm totally with Dhaval on the idea that managed custom actions would
be a good thing. It just makes a lot of sense. I think it makes a lot more
sense than supporting scripts, which as Rob has pointed out many times, are
just asking for trouble if you try to use them. Having C++ as the only
viable alternative is very limiting.
I also agree with some of the other points raised that CAs in general are
hard to write because they require you to design for the "compensating
transaction" programming model and that isn't easy to get right. That
doesn't make managed CAs any less appealing though. It just means they
aren't a slam dunk, any more than the current supported approaches to
writing CAs are. Still, anything that is hard to do in managed code is
likely even harder to do well in native C++. The number of skilled C++
developers is likely to be dwarfed by the number of skilled managed code
developers.
The real issue (as Rob mentioned) is that WI doesn't support it and until
the product does, it isn't too appealing to try to support them in WiX. It
is very hard to get right for the reasons Rob stated and therefore probably
not worth doing at all. The other problem with WiX adding its own support
is that the approach would be proprietary to WiX and therefore would not
translate to future WI implementations, leaving the current WiX users
stranded.
The whole thing makes me sad though. :(
Joe K.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dhaval Patel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Wilson, Phil" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] C# .dll
> Thanks for those words of wisdom :)
>
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