March 2005 Blog Posts
And what would easter be without creme eggs? Apparently the normal creme eggs aren't enough for Robert Podd, he decided to build his own.
What a spoilsport, Virtual PC won't let me recurse;
The promise of xcopy deploy, the ability to simple copy your files onto a destination machine and have your problem run was one of .net's big attractions after the pain of COM, installers and the wrestling match that dllhell produced. As you can reading having to force Crystal Reports onto NT4 threw the concept of xcopy deployment away for that application.
An added hurdle is use of the Windows Event Log. The .net framework provides the System.Diagnostics.EventLog classes to enable you to easily write (and read) events. Merrily you scatter log events throughout your code;
// Put my really...
The project I'm working on right now is targeted at Windows NT 4.0 desktops. The fun and games to get the application running have been long and complicated. The .net framework won't run without an MDAC version below v2.6, but it does install and so the first sign of this you see is when you try to run your application and get an exception that can't be handled. The real fun however has been Crystal Reports.
When you build an installer for an application the installer detects the dependency and adds the merge module for Crystal, crystal_managed2003.msm. So I fire up...