Trip Down Memory Lane

I don't talk about this much these days, but before my career in computers I was once a musician. From 1993 to 1996, I was assigned for duty with "The Commandant's Own" United States Marine Drum and Bugle Corps. It was quite an honor to have earned the privilege to tour with such an outstanding group.

Those were some really great years of my life. Thanks to Facebook, I'm able to keep in touch with my former fellow Marines and in June we'll be having a 75th anniversary reunion in Washington, DC.

So turn up your speakers and press play for a trip down memory lane.

WiX DTF Mystery Solved

Last October a (then) former ( and now current ) coworker also named Chris asked me the following in an email:

I am running into a problem with a DTF custom action. When the action tries to run I get:

"SFXCA: Failed to create new CA process via RUNDLL32."

This on is weird because I am using the exact same module in another product on the same machine and it works like a champ. Bizarre.

My initial reply was:

Are any CA's running before it?

I hadn't seen this error before and I was a little concerned because I was such a proponent of DTF and managed custom actions I was afraid that perhaps DTF had an Achilles' heel. I also knew that where my friend worked was the home of a very restrictive environment so if anyone would find a problem with DTF, it would be him!

I introduced Chris to the creator of DTF, Jason Ginchereau, and the two attempted to troubleshoot the problem with little progress. I didn't really follow up on it because at the time I was busy cranking through sprints for a new product at Multimedia Games.

Fast forward five months and I'm working with Chris again refactoring build automation, creating installation tools and writing custom actions for installs. Suddenly the ugly RUNDLL problem rears it's head again only this time it's MY problem because I'm now the install team lead and I'm always saying how good DTF is.

Rats.

So I email Jason again and log a bug (SF210297) at SourceForge to make sure it gets proper attention this time. This time Jason sees some problems on the unmanaged side of DTF. He was assuming that the current working directory of the recycled process hadn't been mucked with ( remember my comment about other CA's scheduled prior? ) when he made his call to RUNDLL32.

So to make a long story short, I just completed an effort with the build team today to update 30 some virtual machines to have WiX 3.0.5210.0. Between this bug fix and many others related to DTF, I really suggest that anyone using DTF custom actions in builds prior to 5210 upgrade ASAP and don't ship your product until you do. You might never come across this problem but I know I sleep better knowing I won't either now also.

InstallAware Email Thread ... Is this for real?

I came across a very interesting email thread that is really far out there. I almost want to believe it's a fake but having dealt with InstallAware and Michael Nesmith in the past, I can only conclude that it's legit.

You can read the exchange here at CodeProject.com.

When You Wish Upon A Star

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

Wow, have they grown fast! It seems like just yesterday that Ashley and Emma was born.

When you have a 4 year old and a 6 year old who both are princesses, there's only place you can go for vacation... it's simply time to visit the mouse.

Anyone have tips for a first-timer? We'll be going in May before Memorial day.

Wish me luck! :-)

Interesting Tweet

I just saw this tweet on Twitter:



I don't know the whole back story, and I'm sorry Jim feels that his work is going down the drain, but I only have one thing to say to this:

Hip Hip Hooray!!!!!

SQL Server 2005 SP3 Horrible Setup Experience Results in BSOD

I maintain a bootstrapper at work and recently we were asked to update SQL Server 2005 SP2 to SQL Server 2005 SP3.

Not a big deal, right?

Wrong!

When installing SQL 2005 SP3 the setup just blows chunks and reboots the computer via blue screen of death!

Worse, the machine goes into an infinite reboot because the installation is an incomplete state and everytime the SQL services try to start the machine BSODS again.

You can boot safe mode and disable the services and then reboot again. But if you attempt to uninstall SQL server you get an error message saying it can't be accomplished.

Wow, thank you Microsoft, you've outdone yourself yet again.

So in digging into this problem it seems that the SQL team is punting to the Windows team. They are saying that they manifested PE files for Vista/2008 in SP3 and that due to a bug in Windows SXS on SP2 ( hotfix available for SP2 or otherwise update to SP3 ) that there is nothing the SQL team can due to solve this.

Um, they could at least put an AppSearch/LaunchCondition into their install so that my machine doesn't turn into a burning pile of dung!

Anyways here's my official warning. Avoid SP3 like the plague and if you must go there, make sure you provide your own prereq check for SP3 or SxS hotfix level in and as always make sure you integration test your installs on the lowest platform configuration possible. I'd hate for some ISV to test on SP3, never see this problem and then ship a product that embeds SQL to a customer. I'd hate even more to have to be taking that BSOD support call.

Records Being Dropped From Merge Module Projects When Built Using the InstallShield 2009 Standalone Build

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[Update/Retraction 3/16/09]
I like to think I'm a big enough man to admit when I'm wrong, so here goes...
The problem reported in this post is fixed by updating to the SP2 version of IS 2009 Standalone Build. Now in my defense, I didn't know there was an SP2 until I reported this problem because the Software Manager doesn't properly identify the update (so I thought I already had "Standalone Build" installed). Anyway, I'm going to leave the original post up (below) in case any readers have the same problem.
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I thought I'd post information about another bug I found in InstallShield 2009 merge module projects that I found while comparing output from a merge module project built using the standalone builds for IS 12 and IS 2009.

Records entered into the ProgId or Registry tables in the merge module source project do not get created in the output merge module file (.msm).

Acresso support has duplicated this behavior and I am currently working with them to find a work around (my incident number is SIOA-000143195).

This can be a serious issue if you are not using [or cannot use] the "COM Extract At Build" option to populate the appropriate MSI tables with COM interfaces when the module contains COM binaries. An example of this (that I'm stuck with at the moment) is if the install contains 64-bit COM binaries but is actually built on an x86 machine. In this case, the "COM Extract At Build" option doesn't work so we use the "REG File To Merge At Build" option to add the required interfaces directly to the MSI Registry table.

I suspect (but have not confirmed) that this may also occur for any records added to the Class or TypeLib tables in a merge module source project file. There may also be others.