KMorrill's WebLog : Setup

Made it to TechEd

KMorrill — Mon, 24 May 2004 00:01:00 GMT

I made it into TechEd this afternoon without any hitches. The weather was just starting to look up as we pulled out of Seattle, but no doubt pales in comparison to the sun and palm trees down here. I always love seeing Mt. Rainer from up in the air, and this morning was no exception. Definitely a different perspective on the Seattle skyline.

Walking the streets of San Diego, TechEd buzz is in the air. There are banners on the street signposts, and about every fifth person walking on the street has a TechEd backpack. Cool to see lots of devs out and about!

I picked up my pack and shirts at the registration desk, which didn't seem to be quite as long a line as others were talking about earlier. When I got home and unpacked everything, I realized I was going to get a chance to develop my ironing skills, since the shirt was looking pretty wrinkled from sitting in the back for eons. I suck at it :-)

Anyway, as I write I am sitting in the Dev cabana (it's labeled #5, right across from the communications network). It's pretty dead here right now, no doubt folks are saving their questions for later in the week. Drop by with your Deployment/Setup question. If you have gripes about the Visual Studio or .NET Framework setups, I can also take those back to our team :)

Working on the setup team I get to interface with folks all over the Developer Division. So if you have other questions on Visual Studio or the .NET Framework, drop by and I'll help get you connect with the right person.

-Kevin

Installing the .NET Framework

KMorrill — Wed, 12 May 2004 17:46:00 GMT

I wanted to make sure and blog this before I lost the link.

I frequently get asked how to detect whether the .NET Framework is installed and chain it into a setup as a prequisite. The Setup.exe Bootstrapper Sample includes sample codes that shows exactly how to do this.

Cool deployment/setup blog

KMorrill — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 21:45:00 GMT

Michael Dunn from the Windows Deployment team wrote a good post on building a solid setup. For those that didn't catch it, it can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/mdunn/archive/2004/04/09/110702.aspx

-Kevin

Deployment and dependencies

KMorrill — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 21:55:00 GMT

One of the things I work with on my team is how customers deploy their applications when they depend on a redistributable such as the .NET Framework or J#. I am just starting to get my arms around this space, and have more questions than answers right now. Having worked on the Visual Studio setup quite a bit, I know it can be tricky to build your setup when you need to “chain” in a completely separate setup. For example, how do you detect when the dependency is already installed, how do you show progress in a meaningful way to the user with a process that's black box to you, what happens if the outside setup fails, and the list goes on.

For folks out there who have done deployment of the .NET Framework or J# with their application before, how did it go for you? Did you end up using a tool like Visual Studio's deployment project or InstallShield? What problems did you run into?

-Kevin

Progress bars, does anyone trust them?

KMorrill — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 07:07:00 GMT

Our team just finished doing usability research on Visual Studio's setup. These studies are always fascinating to me, because even the most seemingly simple interface can completely crash and burn when presented to someone who is not biased by the effort that went into designing it. One of the things I see repeatedly is how little we actually read UI that's presented to us. When it comes right down to it, the human mind is amazing at skimming text.

Anyways, just about every time I watch users install software and get them talking, they gripe about the progress bar. For Visual Studio in particular, we are notorious for taking a long time to install (hey we're working on it; there's just a ton of stuff to install!). In some versions, the progress bar is accompanied by a text message estimating how long it will take to complete the install. This estimate is kind of like a asymptotic, sinusoidal graph. It goes up and down wildly, and--cross your fingers--gets closer to its target as time goes on. I think we have all been taught overtime to be skeptical by the application that gets to 98% done and then stops dead in its tracks. Do people even trust progress bars anymore? It seems like more than anything I use them as purely an indication that xyz program just hasn't crashed yet. Maybe I just have really low expectations.

-Kevin