When I interviewed for my current position I was asked about familiarity with InstallShield, no questions about MSI itself. I responded honestly that I had no idea, had used it once many moons ago and found it complex, horrible and a pain to understand. What I didn't realize for another 6+ months was that I needed to understand and learn the MSI fundamentals - your real question to any potential employee should be "are you willing to learn?"
The hardest part about Windows Installer is the debugging, not the writing. Rather than having your interviewee write a quick installation package, how about having them open an existing package in ORCA and review/debug/explain it? Maybe show them an error log and ask them what could be causing the issue? (e.g. non-deferred CA trying to write to HKLM has problems with registry virtualization) Scripted custom actions are a no-no, I would say anyone with any "real" setup experience knows this... within 6 months I noticed problems with scripts written by my predecessor and within 12 months I'd pushed to eliminate them completely. (was still using InstallShield at this stage) -- I admit I still use VBScript in controlled environments such for our build process, however our released products are all native MSI with C++ CA's as required (I now use #define _USE_RTM_VERSION for all C++ CA's, something that was overlooked initially) I think the best setup developers are not the best programmers, Windows Installer is all descriptive, not procedural. This is a *very* big generalization based on my own experience... but programmers are more likely to write a quick and dirty CA to "get it done" than figure out why things are breaking, or suggest to the developers that certain tasks be done post-install rather than during install. Windows Installer is easy to learn, just read "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" and subscribe to the wix-users list and you're on your way. The problem I've found is that everyone else who doesn't have to write, maintain or debug installation wants to do *everything* in the MSI, being able to push back and suggest alternatives to doing something "in the MSI" is a huge part of my job. Most people who *think* they know setup, don't. Consider hiring someone who can admit they don't know, but is willing and eager to learn... training from scratch is easier than retraining someone with bad practices ;) Sascha P.S. Anyone who believes disabling UAC is an acceptable workaround for a broken CA should be escorted off the premises immediately :P On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Nathan Stohlmann <nathan.stohlm...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is probably a little bit off topic but I was thinking that this > list might have the right people for the discussion. > > We are doing some interviews for an installation developer position at > my company pretty soon and we got pretty burned with the person who > was previously in the role since I think we thought he had a better > handle of some of the fundamentals of installation development than it > turned out that he did. In an effort to keep that from happening again > we were thinking of coming up with some sort of exercise that could be > done during the interview that would show some level of proficiency. > Kind of like the classic "Write a sorting algorithm" sorts of > questions that are pretty common for more general development > positions. > > Has anyone had any really good installation development focused > interview exercises? > > My initial thought was to write up an installation package for some > sort of dummy software that had a few little requirements and have the > candidate verify the requirements were met by being able to point to > various points of the actual MSI where the requirement was > implemented. It's tempting to take that a step further and put a few > not so subtle bugs in the package to see if they catch them or not. > I'm not sure I can get a machine for the interviews though, but I'm > not sure if printing out a table dump from the MSI through something > like Orca would translate well enough. Thoughts? > > Thanks in advance for any responses. > > (And if you're in the Twin Cities metro area and are looking for an > installation development position, ping me privately and I'll see > about getting your resume to my manager) > > -- > --Nathan Stohlmann > Minneapolis, MN USA > nathan.stohlm...@gmail.com > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Throughout its 18-year history, RSA Conference consistently attracts the > world's best and brightest in the field, creating opportunities for Conference > attendees to learn about information security's most important issues through > interactions with peers, luminaries and emerging and established companies. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsaconf-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
