Noise from the Basement

You can read part one at Upgrading Mini-Compressor to .NET 4.0 Notes post.

One item that I feel has been neglected by Visual Studio is the Setup & Deployment projects.  There has been little improvements to them since Visual Studio 2003 but finally VS2010 has new “feature”:

1. A customer installs your software using the installer created using VS2008.
2. You upgrade your product to .NET 4.0 using VS2010 and create a new MSI.
3. The customer runs your new MSI to upgrade their software.  After the upgrade is complete nothing is installed at all.

I really do mean nothing, no files in the Program Files folder, no registry entries, shortcuts, etc.  The old version is gone along with the new version.  It’s a great new feature, I mean bug.  The bug is known to Microsoft and you can read more about it here.  A summarized description of the error and some workarounds:

I just signed up for PayPal’s new Micropayments.  PayPal seems to be rolling this out slowly as you have to sign-up and then you will be notified in 2 days if you are accepted or not.  In theory it should save us a couple pennies every-time we sell a copy of Mini-Compressor.  The fixed cost per transaction is reduced from $0.30 to $0.05 but the percentage cost goes up from 2.9% to 5%.

All my development work is done on virtual machines (VM), Virtual Box to be exact.  In the past I’ve only needed one VM open at a time and only one version Visual Studio, or other IDE, running in the VM.  On my Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM this was fine with the VM being allocated 1.5 GB of RAM.  Sometimes it would run slow but only for short durations and I could live with it.

A realistic video about software development:

Exclusive How the Gold Master Was Delayed: Part I

If, like me, you typically work on business software for a single large client, aside from (shameless plug) Mini-Compressor, then make the following substitutions:

Publisher –> Large Company  Buying Custom Software

Gold Master –> Release Date Promised to Customer Picked by Throwing Darts at a Calendar

Forum Troll –> Employee at Customer Company Trying to Fail Project for his/her Political Reasons

My notes on upgrading Mini-Compressor from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0 (Visual Studio 2008 to 2010) and also upgrading NUnit and NAnt.

1. Run the automated VS 2010 upgrade process.  Appears that there are no error but appearances can be deceiving.

2. Try a compile and get errors about not being about to find NUnit.  This makes sense as I upgraded NUnit on the build machine and the path had changed.  One day I should just reference the dll via a lib folder.  Update the NUnit reference and all the errors go away but…

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