And you think my statuses are impenatrable

Doing my weekly tour of WriteIIsConfig FAILED Google search results I came across something in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase with this heading: You receive error code 0x80071a90 during Standalone or Configuration Manager Integration setup of MBAM 2.0. <DanHudson>WWWHHHHAAAAAAT?!</DanHudson>

Things are looking gravy again

Wednesday and Thursday were depressing days at work. All of the gains from last week crumbled into a crapular pit of despair on Wednesday afternoon. And then I decided to rewrite an entire module from the ground up. This is different than refactoring in that I don’t have the time to make improvements, I’m only…

Wix is ruining my life

On the one hand, yay, job security! On the other hand, holy hell! Probably more a factor of how we initially wrote the code, but the upgrade path has been abysmal going from v3.0 to v3.6. Just today I had to rewrite almost three years of custom actions just to get the damn things to…

There comes a time…

When coding a largish application from the ground up there comes a time when things look bleak. This usually happens shortly after the application becomes too complex to hold the whole thing in your memory. Either the levels of abstraction get too disorienting or, if you’ve foregone abstraction, keeping all of the “meaningful indexes” straight…

Major upgrades on instance transforms

Holy crap. The degree of dislike I have for Windows Installer service is already kind of pegged. An object lesson in overengineering for very little gain. Well, it could work awesomely if it wasn’t a backwater in Microsoftland and if the Microsoft supported authoring framework wasn’t an “open source” initiative that is completely understaffed. Then…