Re: [WiX-users] yep - back to being 100% frustrated

Sat, 17 May 2008 05:26:52 -0700 

Good points Mike.   Personally I'm starting to pay attention to application 
virtualization solutions.    Just as once upon a time I made the transition 
from script based installs to MSI based installs, I'm wondering if one day in 
my future I'll be able to just get rid of the install all together.     I see 
this as a possibility for simple client side applications.  Unfortunatly for 
things that have much more complicated dependencies I wonder if it'll ever be a 
possibility.  
  
Mike Dimmick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
        v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}  o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}  
w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}  .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}        
        It’s true for simple applications, but those simple applications are 
just anything that can be written to be statically linked into a single binary. 
You could do this on Windows if you were prepared to stick to those rules – and 
you can produce quite powerful applications that way, if you cared to do it. 
But you’d have to forgo anything that needs a shared library or framework or 
fonts – basically anything bigger than a single file. Apple’s page “Installs 
for Product Developers” says:
   
  For anything that requires something shared, it’s a myth. The icon you 
drag-and-drop is an installer. It’s just that drag-and-drop invokes the 
installer, the same way that double-clicking invokes an MSI installer. See 
‘Managed Installs’ in Apple’s Software Delivery Guide at 
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/SoftwareDistribution/Managed_Installs/chapter_5_section_1.html.
   
  I think the difference really is that there isn’t such a prevalence of shared 
libraries on the Mac as on Windows, and of things like multiple disk volumes. 
To upgrade your Mac, you buy a new one, you don’t start adding disks (because 
on most Macs, you can’t add internal disks). It makes for a far simpler 
environment. Also, the pace of support for new operating systems is much 
faster, most Mac apps won’t install on the OS earlier than one version before 
current. A lot of us are still writing software to work on Windows 2000 (I hope 
no-one here is still building ANSI apps for Windows 9x though!) There are also 
many, many places where Windows allows plug-ins (e.g. Explorer context menus) 
that just aren’t there on the Mac.
   
  Microsoft’s approach tends to be to offer many new features even on 
down-level operating systems. Imagine if your customers had to update to XP.3 
in order to get .NET 2.0, or Windows Vista 6.1 to get .NET 3.5! But that makes 
deployment much more complicated, because you have to deploy the framework you 
depend on, and its dependencies, to get your program to work at all.
   
  Also Mac apps tend to be less configurable. The million-questions approach 
taken by most Windows install packages is ridiculous when you consider that 
most users just go with the defaults. Clicking through Windows Installer 
wizards is a pain in the neck. It’s not as if selecting a reduced install of 
Office 2003 or 2007 actually reduces the disk space used, because (to prevent 
problems with finding original media when patching or repairing) a complete 
copy of the install is cached on your hard disk anyway. You might as well 
install the whole thing to begin with. And a repair is only necessary when some 
shared component has been stomped on with an incompatible version anyway.
   
  -- 
  Mike Dimmick
   
        
---------------------------------
  
  From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Scott Palmer
Sent: 13 May 2008 19:58
To: Josh Rowe
Cc: WiX Users
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] yep - back to being 100% frustrated

   
      
On a Mac you would just drag and drop the application icon. The very existence 
of an installer is frowned upon for most things.  Why doesn't Microsoft rip-off 
that instead of the desktop eye-candy? :-)






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