Doctor Deploys Blog

We had quite a bug bounce this week. Most of the bugs were regressions from the last couple weeks of major work plus some triage by Bob and Candy through Votive bugs. Yet somehow we still managed to finish the night with a lower bug count than last week.

Again, kudos go to Mike for getting us back to 0 extension bugs. WiX v2 never had 0 extension bugs. Also, great effort on killing heat bugs tonight. I expect next week we’ll just have a couple left for Jason when he gets back from his vacation. <smile/>

Sadly we’ve had a couple bugs show up in candle (bugs in the core toolset always make me sad). However, one fix is underway and have a query out to the Windows Installer team about the second (AppSearch documentation is painful). We did get an answer back on the final light bug so we’ll be able to make progress there finally.

Original post by Rob Mensching

There was some confusion on December 5th when Bob provided highlights for the WiX toolset "beta exit" build. I saw a number of people declaring the WiX toolset finally "in beta". That’s not quite right. The WiX toolset was in beta for all of last year as we worked through the feature set and quality bar. As 2008 came to a close it felt like WiX v3 was a solid improvement over WiX v2 and the quality markedly improved.

Now the WiX toolset is in "release candidate" mode. Release candidate is a term made up at Microsoft to describe software that is accepting fewer and fewer changes. I think it is easiest to define release candidate in contrast to beta. During the beta period you are looking for feedback on feature set and overall completeness of the software. During the release candidate period you are fixing bugs to finish the software project.

Finishing is an important and often difficult process in software. Each change you make has the ability to break already working functionality or expose even less desirable behavior. At some point in time you have to choose to fix bugs in the next release and declare this one done.

That’s what we are starting to do with the WiX toolset now. Adding MSI 5.0 support to WiX was completed later than we would have liked but we were dependent on the release of the new MSI SDK. Similarly the Visual Studio team has promised support for Votive in the next version of Visual Studio and that functionality will be coming in late.

However, we are going to start punting bugs to the next version of the WiX toolset. Remember the WiX toolset is not in beta any more. We are on the glide path to shipping.

Original post by Rob Mensching

Two weekends ago, Windows 7 beta builds were made available. That meant the new MSI SDK was available on MSDN with all the information about what’s new in MSI 5.0. In turn, that meant we had some work to do to teach the WiX toolset some new tricks.

Bob and I split the work up last Wednesday. He took the "UI work" and I took the "server work". After a couple nights of coding (interrupted by all the other things we get interrupted by) we had all of the functionality designed, built, debugged and posted to SourceForge in the latest WiX toolset release. I’ll talk about the features I implemented in detail later but Bob has a nice overview of the changes on his blog..

Staying current with the Windows Installer changes is important to those of us that work on the WiX toolset. That is why we work hard to get the changes in as quickly as possible. In addition to staying current, we also help flush out bugs for the Windows Installer team. I think Bob and I have reported six bugs (mostly documentation issues) so far. Those of you that pick up these builds will help further validate both the WiX toolset and Windows Installer 5.0.

So keep coding, you know I am.

Original post by Rob Mensching

I just fixed the first bug in my new RobMensching.Blog engine. When I finally got around to running the engine’s new feed through the Feed Validator. I had tested subscribing to the feed with IE’s built in feed rendering as well RSS Bandit and Live Writer. But, of course, the Feed Validator found two more issues.

1. feed/@uri - I had incorrectly named this attribute "url". Typical mistake. I wish "i" and "l" were more distinguishable (not that I would have noticed anyway <grin/>).
2. feed/entry/@id - turns out an ATOM entry id is supposed to be full URI. That makes sense for the case where an entry floats alone.

Unfortunately, this bug means that once again, those of you that subscribe to the feed are going to see a bunch of duplicates. I’m sorry. The only upside is that I think it won’t happen again.

Original post by Rob Mensching

After a couple bumps this morning, I finally upgraded my blog to the brand new RobMensching.Blog engine. All of the old links should redirect to their new location, especially the feed subscription link, so no need to worry about updating your links. However, if you are subscribed to my feed you probably saw a few duplicate entries show up since the RobMensching.Blog engine generates entry/@ids differently than Subtext.

So how about a few fun facts about RobMensching.Blog engine:

• 50% Software + 50% Service - I very much prefer writing and editing blog entries in a client rather than a web browser. That’s why I love the "Software plus Service" message promoted by Microsoft. Thus RobMensching.Blog is built around the awesomeness that is Windows Live Writer. Not only are posts completely managed by Writer but I route comment moderation through the custom buttons in Writer. There is no "admin console" on the server side.
• 100% AtomPub - the RSS and the MetaWeblog API specifications felt very gooey and hacky to me. Conversely the Atom and AtomPub RFCs felt specific and well designed. When I learned that Writer would support AtomPub I was elated that I could completely bypass RSS and MetaWeblog API.
• 5% the code - Subtext always felt incredibly bloated for me. Subtext has roughly 37,000 lines of code (I skipped all unit test code, blank lines and comments). RobMensching.Blog has about 4,000 lines of code but 2000 of that is generated by LINQ to SQL. That means there is really only 1,900 lines of actual code or 5% of Subtext. Now Subtext does a bit more than RobMensching.Blog but I didn’t want most of it. 1,900 is a lot easier for me to remember, enhance and verify later.

As I mentioned before the server is running IIS7, .NET Framework v3.5, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server 2005 via LINQ to SQL.

I may make the source code available in the future but there are a few more things I want to implement before considering that. In the meantime, please let me know if you find any issues or have any comments about the new look and feel. I control all of the code now so improvements are only limited by my available time.

Original post by Rob Mensching

Qik is working on my phone again so I thought I’d try getting back on the video horse. I conned Bob into holding the phone for me. But, I was still nervous about starting. So, we were talking a little bit and I realized that I was starting to address a comment left on my blog a long time ago.  The comment went something like, “I prefer when you write blog entries instead of embedding video content because I can digest the text better than the images.”

To loosen up a bit, I told Bob to record and I’d take a shot at answering the comment:

So to summarize, these videos aren’t really intended to deliver technical content. Instead they are attempts to provide more context about the people that are doing the technical things. There is a lot more to the people that write the letters that appear on your screen and I’m experimenting with ways of expressing that.

I’m obviously still experimenting with the new technology here so your feedback is very interesting to me.

 

Original post by Rob Mensching

A year ago, I had a problem posting to my blog here due to an overflowing log file. At that time, I investigated other blogging engines and came up generally dissatisfied with the available options. Ultimately, I came away thinking it’d be fun to write my own blog engine.

Well, before moving to the Live Mesh team I decided I should work on some project to learn all the new features of .NET v3.5 such as LINQ and extension methods. The WiX toolset wasn’t a good option since it purposely targets .NET Framework 2.0. So I decided to create something new.

At that time the ASP.NET MVC project seemed to be shaping up. Given my experiments with shoving Model View Presenter into ASP.NET I was very interested to see if ASP.NET MVC was any better. Then my ISP announced my servers would be moving to Windows 2008 & IIS7.

That cinched it. I was going to learn .NET v3.5 and ASP.NET MVC by writing a new blog engine.

I now have an early version ready to upload once I get the server configuration all worked out. It took four months of on and off development with a solid push over the last couple weeks around Christmas to get ready. It was a great learning experience.

I do have a short list of other features to develop later and there are probably more than a couple bugs to fix once it’s live. So I wanted to warn everyone that things might be a little bouncy here over the next couple weeks until I get all the kinks worked out.

 

Original post by Rob Mensching

It is the last day of 2008. Jenny mentioned this morning that she thought we had been through a lot of change. I immediately agreed. I said I felt we were at the end of the beginning. Let’s recap.

On the personal side, about half way through the year Jenny and I finally decided that we would sell “my house” in preparation to find “our house”. We spent all of the summer updating the house to sell in a very tough market. We painted everything inside and out, updated the kitchen and all of the bathrooms, planted plants and flowers then watered and watered. Finally, by August the house was on the market

44 days later, after three open houses and too many showings to count we had an offer. Looking back Jenny and I were incredibly fortunate. Not fortunate just because the average time on market was 90 - 120 days and the market took an incredible beating shortly after we closed. We were fortunate because the day we had a solid offer, Jenny and I found our dream house. The sellers had a contingent offer on another house but were about to give up since their house was not closing.

In a very stressful two weeks Jenny and I negotiated the final deal on the house we were selling and made a contingent offer on the dream house. There were several days where it felt like everything would just come unglued. But by the beginning of November we were moved in and still pinching ourselves that we now lived in such a beautiful house. I expect Jenny and I will be here for quite a long time firmly ending the semi-nomadic life of early adulthood.

On the professional side, this year has been the most action packed 12 months of my life. Lots of code checked in and shipped out. Let’s just go through the list.

At the beginning of the year we declared WiX v2 Production/Stable. That was a huge accomplishment only overshadowed by the announcement that WiX v3 would be shipping in Visual Studio. Technically speaking it was last year that I announced that the WiX toolset would ship as part of Visual Studio but it was this year that I feel we really made significant progress toward actually shipping. We made necessary the adjustments to the WiX v3 roadmap to stay on track and over the last 6 months the WiX v3 bug count has plummeted. Every Thursday of every week this year I have enjoyed the hours spent with all the people that volunteer on the WiX toolset. It’s a great project with great people.

All the other professional excitement happened at the end of the year. First, I announced that I was joining the Live Mesh team during all of the turmoil of preparing a house for sale. However, I couldn’t talk about the project I was leaving since it didn’t officially launch until November: Microsoft Store. Trevin Chow, the lead Program Manager, had a good blog entry about the launch of Microsoft Store. A little later he wrote an in depth entry about the piece of the project that I worked on most: the Microsoft Store Download Manager. Those two blog entries provide a pretty good overview of what I was working on for most of 2008. That team was a lot of fun and I really liked the way the Download Manager turned out. I stop by and talk to friends on Microsoft Store team every once in a while since the WiX Working Group meets on the 4th floor of their building.

Of course, the end of the year finds me on the Live Mesh team. The weeks before the PDC were some of the most intense days of programming since I left college. Delivering a technology that forms the linchpin of several executive key notes at one of the largest gathering of developers for the Microsoft platform is a bit awe inspiring if not incredibly tense. In the days since, we’ve been gathering feedback about how the technology previews are being used and creating a plan for the next year to come. But this blog entry isn’t about the future so I’ll stop there. <smile/>

As I noted in the beginning it feels like I’m at the end of the beginning. I’ve enjoyed getting here and now I’m looking forward to finding my way into the future.

Have a Happy New Year!

 

Original post by Rob Mensching