Doctor Deploys Blog

Every once in a while I make a mistake where I know I did something wrong but cannot pinpoint the exact problem. These are the worse kind of mistakes because I don’t know what I need to learn to avoid repeating the mistake. As a result I often back away from the problem even though leaving the issue un-addressed may be yet another mistake.

I made one of these mistakes on this blog back in December of 2006. Sinan Karaca from InstallAware Software Corporation asked me to blog about their new WiXAware product. At the time, I had a very negative impression of the company based on my conversations with other people. While I was impressed with Sinan’s presentation and believed that WiXAware showed great promise, I allowed my negative impression to color our discussion and, later, my two blog posts.

After realizing that something had gone wrong I backed away from the whole issue and left it unresolved.

A few weeks ago, Sinan reopened the discussion and we traded emails until it became crystal clear to me what mistake I had made 18 months ago. The fundamental mistake I made was that I never gave InstallAware the opportunity to address the issues I had based my negative impression on. In the recent email discussion, Sinan explained his side of the story and I came to realize how the misunderstandings began then spiraled out of control.

I apologized to Sinan and he forwarded my apology on to the WiXAware team. If I could undo my mistake, I would. Fortunately, Sinan was good enough to reopen the dialog when he saw an opportunity and help me see clearly what I did wrong and allow me to learn from it. I immediately offered to make my apology public in an effort to bring the issue to close and Sinan accepted.

 

Sinan Karaca and InstallAware Software Corporation, I apologize for the attitude I had in our first meeting and follow up posting. I fully admit that I should have given you the opportunity to explain up front and address any grievances I might have had. I’m sorry.

 

From here I hope that InstallAware and Sinan and I can start again. I also encourage you to develop you own impression of InstallAware Software Corporation. Finally, for those of you that haven’t already made this mistake, please learn from mine.

 

Original post by Rob Mensching

I forgot to mention last week that my blog was going to be down over the weekend. I’m on a free ISP so I don’t complain when they say, “We’re going to go down over the weekend to upgrade the electrical system in our building. Your email will be cached and sent when we come back up Monday.”

Besides, no one reads my blog on the weekend.

 

Original post by Rob Mensching

A couple weeks ago I posted a blog entry that I had mentally labeled “the lead balloon experiment” even before I finished. In that entry, I asked the question, “Should consistent inflammatory remarks be ignored or is it important to address the remarks to present the other side of the issue and attempt to debate the underlying issues?” I got some great feedback and wanted to roll it up here.

First, the blog entry was a social experiment of sorts. There were several questions that I had before writing it and was curious what other people thought. Of course, my hope was to get a different perspective. As noted above, I knew the experiment might “go over like a lead balloon” since the word “troll” is highly subjective and inflammatory itself. Trust me the hypocrisy built into that blog entry was not lost on me. But I decided the risk was worth it and I’m glad I did because I learned some interesting things.

So, what did I learn (note: I’ll only quote the publicly posted comments):

1. “I think it is good that you are engaging the community to find out whether more people feel that way; this is the beauty of blogging.” - A very large part of the experiment was to see if I was alone in thinking the majority of the blog entries were inflammatory. Not one of the comments I received argued that I was misinterpreting the tone and should reset my expectations for civil conversation. Had the comments gone the other way, I would have posted a public apology and spent a lot of time reapplying the Teflon.

2. “My suggestion is to stick with objective facts and quit the discussion once it has deviated from that.” - A number of people suggested addressing the core issue while ignoring the inflammatory remarks. This is definitely the “high road” and very possibly the right thing to do. The major issue with this tactic is that you are now, at least at some level, condoning the inflammatory remarks. Personally, I have a hard time rewarding such behavior at any level.

3. “If you blog more ‘constructive content’, then the trolls won’t survive very long because the community will know what they say is ‘****hit’.” - The suggestion that I just “blog more” in attempt to get my actual beliefs out there is great. Of course, that suggestion also noted that more time spent fixing bugs in WiX would be great too. <grin/> While I really do like this suggestion the balance of coding vs. blogging vs. living will continue to be challenge.

4. “FanBoy’s aren’t much better.” - I hadn’t thought about this since don’t think we have any “fanboys” for the WiX toolset (seriously, does anyone love installation technologies that much?). However, I would agree with the sentiment. Don’t feed the fanboys. <smile/>

5. “Remember back in the old days you’d go out on the playground and beat each other up and then become best friends?” - The more I thought about it the playground analogy seemed amazingly fitting. For everyone not involved, I can understand this whole public admonishment to be rather immature. However, I learned a very long time ago that sometimes you have to stand up for yourself. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that doesn’t mean they are entitled to attack you or your friends personally, especially in public.

Conclusion.

I am ignoring trolls in an all out passive aggressive fashion. <smile/> I long ago stopped reading blogs from them but I have now updated my Inbox rules to better filter out email from them and I am investigating ways to not have them show up in my search queries (unfortunately, not sure Technorati completely supports this). That does mean I will run the risk of not addressing incorrect information being spread by them. So, if you ever want my perspective on a particular topic or have a question about my actual beliefs just drop me a comment or note here. I’ll try to address them directly.

This stance might seem extreme to some or immature to others. I’ll leave that decision up to you but let me leave you with two things:

1. In college I took a class where the only thing the professor said on most days was, “Remember, you can never take power. You can only give it away. Now discuss how power affects you in the here and now.” It was a fascinating class and an incredible experience. One of the things it taught me was that you control how much “energy” you give another person. In this case, I’ve decided to no longer give any more energy (usually in the form of personal frustration) to individuals that exhibit, for lack of better term, troll-like behavior.

2. When the most important person in your life suggests that maybe it just isn’t worth it, you listen. In this case, my wife has watched me struggle with how to interact with troll-like behavior for years. My desire to address the underlying issues without feeding the personal attacks routinely leaves me frustrated. With this latest individual, Jenny firmly suggested that it just isn’t worth it. This time, I’m listening. <smile/>

 

Finally, I want to point out that my Inbox rules will not filter out email sent directly and only To: me. I definitely want to leave a channel open to discuss and/or reconcile previous injuries (on both sides) if the individuals want to talk. My opinions do change and I will happily admit when I am wrong when challenged with objective data and no personal attacks.

 

Original post by Rob Mensching

Apart from the feature work that we did in Windows Installer 4.5, we made a few changes to Windows Installer to address some user feedback or pain points. Here’s some of the important issues that were addressed:

1. Added SeBackupPrivilige back to the Windows Installer service. This sould help any custom actions that needed this privilige like the ones that were reported on the Vista Compatability Team blog.


2. Some case sensitive service name comparisions in InstallValidate used to result in an unnecessary files-in-use message on Vista. This is now fixed in Windows Installer 4.5.


3. When a patch added new content in the form of a new component and that patch was being uninstalled, we used to remove that content, even if that content is shared by other products. This is now fixed in Windows Installer 4.5.

In addition to this, since Windows Installer 4.5 is the latest release of Windows Installer, it will have all the fixes and feature work that we did till Vista SP1.

[Author: Hemchander  Sannidhanam]
This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm.

Original post by Windows Installer Team