Doctor Deploys Blog

As I’m sure you are aware, Microsoft provides free drinks. Since we gather weekly at Building 37, it is just a short walk to one of the kitchens on the floor when someone gets thirsty. On their way out the door that person will often call out, "Drinks?" Tonight’s video of the night goes out to Eric St. John and all the other code monkeys out there.

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Original post by Rob Mensching

In .NET 4 we have quite a few deployment options available for redistribution. There are basically 2 pivots. The Client/Full profiles and 32bit/32+64bit packages.

Here are the four redistributable options and their corresponding sizes.

The Client Profile is targeted to contain the parts of the .NET Framework that are used by most client applications and gives people the option to carry a little less payload if they use less of the Framework.

The 32+64bit packages are designed to give the option of installing either profile on any target machine regardless of OS architecture. On the other hand, if someone is targeting a pure 32bit customer segment, the 32bit package gives the option of reduced size with reduced breath of deployment.

Original post by Peter Marcu

Bob posted a blog entry how to use TortoiseHg to access the WiX source code on CodePlex. I thought the blog post was great but suffered from one fundamental flaw. It required you to do a whole bunch of mouse clicking. Here’s how to get into the WiX toolset source code using the command-line.

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Original post by Rob Mensching

There was a small change made to the WiX toolset recently that added dialogs to the WixUI library that are shown when patching. That part of the change was straight forward, the tricky part was that the dialog needed to support all the existing languages or the patch UI could come up in a different language (English) than the initial install. Fortunately, the Office Communications Server team (who was adding the patch dialog) was willing to localize the dialogs in all languages they support, 30+ of them. That’s good news but there is some bad news.

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Original post by Rob Mensching

Almost 2 years ago I asked for feedback on your experience deploying .NET applications and using the .NET Framework deployment packages (Do you deploy a managed App).

We took a lot of the feedback from my blog and various other places and implemented features in .NET 4.0. Based on the feedback, we focused on size, performance, and robustness which I also recently posted about (The .NET Framework 4 Installer Improvements).

I’m really interested in getting feedback from everyone on how we did and get ideas for what we can do to make the experience better in the next release. We definitely take every bit of feedback seriously and value it highly and I want to say I always appreciate the time people spend to respond. Feel free to answer as many of these questions as you are compelled to.

Questions:

1. Have you decided to update your application to .NET 4? Was deployment a factor in that decision?

2. Did .NET Framework 4 solve all of your deployment problems? Did you like it?

3. Where did we miss with .NET Framework 4 deployment? What didn’t you like?

4. What do you think about the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile option?

5. Did you find all the documentation and examples you needed to be able to use .NET 4?

6. What do you think about the new size of the .NET package?

7. Do you know about the redist and web installers? If so, which do you use?

8. Do you use a bootrapper/chainer that preinstalls .NET? If not, do you block? If so,

- Which one (VSI, InstallShield, Wise, ClickOnce, custom)?

- Do you run .NET in silent mode or UI mode?

9. Do you have any specific problems you can tell me about that you have had in deploying the .NET Framework?

Some more question that will help me understand your scenario:

10. How large is your application? (Size, install base)

11. How is your product deployed (Web download, CD, DVD, USB)?

Optional:

12. What company are you with?

13. What is your application?

14. Can I follow up with you? If so, email me your contact info along with your answers

As always. I very much appreciate getting everyone’s feedback. Hope to hear from many of you.

Original post by Peter Marcu

This is was video I found a long while ago and stuck it into the queue for a night when we just need something kinda’ cool and kinda’ cute. The animation is pretty good and the story is amusing. It isn’t quite Pixar level work but the fact that I’m even willing to make the comparison says a lot about this animation. Besides who doesn’t love a short spy story?

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Original post by Rob Mensching

The Kleptones create some of the most incredible mash-ups. Recently, he released a few teaser tracks and Flik Flok was in the mix. Its obviously a cross with Kesha’s silly, stupid and catchy song. Anyway, I was listening to Flik Flok when I saw someone had crossed Tik Tok with Star Trek. The whole thing was so ridiculous that I queued the video for tonight. Yes, it this is silly, stupid and Star Trek.

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Original post by Rob Mensching

A few weeks ago I mentioned the WiX Working Group was moving out of its darkest days. It was difficult to articulate the problems we were facing. Then I saw this video. It explained it all.

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Original post by Rob Mensching