MSI == Made Suddenly Irrelevant
Have I finally found something that chaps my butt enough to get off my lazy ass and start blogging again?
Yes, I jolly well think I have. And it's nice to be back, thanks.
(No,my blog is still not on Community Server, even though everyone else in the world seems to be. Even manic depressives have found time to skin their own CS sites furgawdsake. I have plenty of excuses though. Trust me. But we live in a tagged world now, so I'll just say "Moving House, Vacation, Vacation, In-laws Visit, Garage Build, Lots of Work, Screaming Kids" and leave it at that.)
Ok, so CS. Yeah, 2.1 is just a squeak away from being released. Beta builds are flying and lots of late night/early morning iterative cycles are grinding away. And CS is really the prettiest thing. I'm looking forward to using it here when I just HAVE A FEW MINUTES TO MYSELF, ALRIGHT?
Hehe.
I wish there was a way to start some demonic beating of drums at this point. Right now, when you start the next paragraph, not "onload" or any of that annoying geocities crap, but when your eyeballs read the next line. But there isn't (yet), so please start doing it in your head at least. Now..
MSI.
(pause, 2, 3, 4)
Ok, you can stop the music now.
I build the CS MSI's - and if you're observant you'll realize that until a week ago that wouldn't have been plural. Yes, there's now a second one specifically for ASP.NET 2.0 that does quite a few things slightly differently.
But that's all boring stuff, the interesting part was that it got me into VS 2005 at last. I've had it for yonks, but never built anything in it until this week. Generally I like it but the Extract Method sucks, MSI's cannot be signed anymore and since we share source with VS 2003 we have to be careful to edit dialogs in VS 2003 if we want to be able to build in both places.
But wait, what was that second thing again?
Ah, well spotted.
The pictures explain it all. First, in VS 2003:
..and now in VS 2005:
Quite similar apart FROM THE BIG GAPING HOLE WHERE AUTHENTICODE USED TO BE.
But, it's just something I haven't installed, probably, so off to the help system (oh, I forgot that the help system's new window is now very, very different and therefore I think that sucks too).
The help system, it turns out, isn't very helpful on the topic of signing MSI.
It does however talk a lot about signing ClickOnce applications. Mmmmm. Do I start to smell another infamous MS bait and switch? Sure, ClickOnce is good and all, and it has some advantages over MSI, but it's not like they would suddenly withdraw support for something with a dedicated and happy user base already, is it?
Oh.
***.
No, but it's ok, because we'll be able to use the command-line tools for now and that''ll get us over the immediate crisis and then we can all jump on the ClickOnce bus and summon all our strength for .NET 3.0 HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Stay on topic Shaw.
So, off to the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt and the awesome SignTool (which like all command-line tools is more powerful than any slack-jawed *** GUI any day).
*sigh*
It doesn't have an option to use a pvk file.
I have a pvk file.
VS 2003 used to ask me for my pvk file.
I like my pvk file.
But, it does have a Signing Wizard! Yes, the command-line tool has a /signwizard command that launches a.. a.. GUI? lol
So, the first question is to choose the file to sign. The file choices are exe, dll, ocx, cab, stl and cat. No MSI? I choose *.* just because I'm not going to be stopped at this stage, no Sir.
Let's go through the advanced options. There you go, a place to select my pvk file. All is well, James wins! 1-nil.
Except for the 5-6 hours lost productivity and the extra 37 mouse clicks and 81 keystrokes that have been added to every single build of the MSI.
Because none of this can be scripted. Woo-hoo!
ClickOnce, here we come.
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