Doctor Deploys Blog

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