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August 14, 2007

BUGBUG: Yikes!

Black and Yellow Argiope
Argiope Aurantia

I couldn't help taking a picture of this scary looking, yet harmless spider this morning. It's the coolest thing I've seen in awhile so I'm going to let it live what's left of it's short life. Regardless, it's a fitting picture for my thoughts today.

I've been getting contacted by fellow developers thanking me for noticing the InstallShield COM Extraction bug. I did a dinner/movie with a former coworker who expressed relief that this was found.

But the truth is, I didn't catch it, I just finally noticed it. Others have been stung much worse and I'm suprised that given the severity of this issue, that Macrovision hasn't been more proactive in raising attention to this issue. The annoying Update Manager popped up on my screen today and it wasn't listed. There wasn't a DevLetter style email, or anything else.

I decided to do a search of Community and I found this interesting thread:


And just to prove history repeats itself, this has happened before:



BTW, I don't know about you, but when I encounter the same bug more then once, thats a clue to write a unit test. Perhaps my next blog will be an InstallScript ICE that checks for scary registry table entries. Until then, remember two things: Always use an integration test machine that you can virtualize or reimage and always test your uninstalls.

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