About Heath Stewart's Blog
Many people take product installation and servicing for granted but it's actually very complex. Tools such as Visual Studio's Windows Installer product make it seem easy but there's a lot of factors that have to be considered, especially with large products like Visual Studio and system components like the .NET Framework.
Windows Installer provides a powerful installation mechanism but if everything isn't done just right, servicing the product is difficult or impossible. The Developer Division Customer Product-lifecycle Experience team is in place partly to make sure that doesn't happen. I help drive serviceability requirements and spend a lot of time researching Windows Installer and helping the Windows Installer team answer questions - primarily about patches.
Before coming to Microsoft I was an MVP for Visual C# and continue my experiences. My favorite topics are design-time control and COM interoperability, being an old COM developer myself. On occasion you'll see blog posts about these.
I generally try to keep more personal topics off the corporate servers, but you can find my rants and musings at http://spaces.msn.com/heaths. I signed up originally to help beta test the site and continue to use it.
