Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I followed the steps that Jeff Atwood outlined to create a blank VPC image. Having a really small VPC is nice for testing stuff out, especially now that I’m running Vista at home.

My Wix installer creates a new user on the machine that I’ll use as the user for the Monorail web application. While testing the installer out I kept getting an error while creating the user and I naturally assumed it was my (lack of) Wix skills.

Eventually I just tried creating a user through the computer management snap-in and that was failing too. So it wasn’t an issue with my Wix file, but it was still an issue.

Go back to creating a small VPC. I used XPLite to remove a bunch of junk, so I fired that up again to see if I removed something that I shouldn’t have. I did.

Just an FYI to people trying to make small VPCs, don’t remove the “Active Directory” item under the Advanced items. Its less than 100k and its worth it so you don’t have this (and potentially other) issues.

I went and saw the Arctic Monkeys on Monday night at First Avenue downtown. The show was pretty good, their equipment was setup very well, I didn’t need to wear earplugs like I normally do.

After playing for a little over an hour, the band left the stage and the crowd starting cheering for an encore. About 30 seconds later the lights came on and the crew was taking the stuff off the stage. I think that was the first time I’ve ever seen a band NOT come back for an encore. Its not like the crowd was cheering or didn’t like them.

When the lights came back on, people were kind of looking around like “seriously?”. It was strange.

Has anyone else seen them on their tour? Was there an encore at your show?

Heres a little tip for you. If you end up removing the ‘Show Desktop’ its not obvious how to put it back, because its not just a regular shortcut (theres no ShowDesktop.exe or anything). Here’s a link to the instructions for getting it back:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/190355

One thing I forgot to mention in the last post was that I was looking around for a Wix-contrib kind of site, does anyone know if something like that exists?

It would seem that the simple interfaces that I want to add to my installer must have been created by somebody before, and I’ll leverage anything I can find.

I think the custom interfaces is the one place that Visual Studio Setup projects are better than Wix, but just for the ease of use, not any functionality differences.

I’ve been really digging into Wix over the last couple days to move along the installer for my side project.Currently, the installer installs four things:

• Sql Server database
• MonoRail web application
• Windows service
• Console application

What I need to do now is allow the user to pick a server to install the database on (hardcoded as the local machine right now) and also specify a sql username/password to run the database setup scripts with (also hardcoded as the ’sa’ account). This turns out to be non-trivial. Based on my research it looks like I’ll have to write a custom dialog in my .wxs file that contains the text fields that I want the user to fill in, and then bind those text boxes to the corresponding Wix properties.
I wish there was a way to have Wix generate the dialog for me, especially in the case where I just need some text boxes, nothing too fancy.

When getting the Monorail web app installation working, I discovered the ability of tallow.exe to examine a directory structure and generate the corresponding Wix fragment to make that structure get installed. So I just ran that command on my build folder and I saved myself the hassle of typing each file into my .wxs file. I didn’t see a way to send the output of tallow to a file though, but you can just redirect the command line output to a file like this:

tallow.exe -d DIR-TO-MIRROR -dav > FILE-TO-OUTPUT

One thing that tallow won’t do for you though is generate guids in the appropriate places, so I had to go through and do a big find/replace. Still saved me a lot of time though.

After I get the database installation issues sorted out, I’m moving on to allowing the user to pick which web site to install the Monorail application under, currently the installer just assumes the web site at port 80, but I can’t really assume thats where everyone will want it located. The interface for that will be more complicated than the database setup, so I want to make sure I’m doing things right.

I read in the paper this morning that the Minneapolis wifi network is scheduled to get turned on next week in the Seward neighborhood, downtown is slated for later this month.

The last update I had, it was scheduled to be done by late this year, it would seem they are ahead of schedule.

“Initially customers will be able to buy wireless Internet download speeds of 1 million bits per second for $19.95 a month, said Joe Caldwell, the company’s sales vice president.”

……

“US Internet plans to add other, faster tiers of Internet service once the wireless network is installed, Caldwell said. The company first needs to test the strength of the Wi-Fi radio signals in different parts of the city, because geographical barriers and buildings can affect the signal.”

$20 a month is a pretty good deal for basic internet service, it’ll be interesting to see exactly how fast the “faster tiers” are. I haven’t heard much locally about St. Paul doing a citywide wifi network, but I would definitely consider subscribing to it if they do.