Geocortex Blog

Most developers, in their never-ending quest for order, seem to spend a lot of time refactoring code. Visual Studio 2008 has a number of functions that take care of common refactoring tasks but they cover only files that are included in projects and work best against source code. While working on the Optimizer project, I recently refactored some code and in the process, changed the name of some tags in our settings files. Some of these files are referenced by our projects but others are deployed elsewhere. I could hunt them all down and change them manually, or I could use a tool to do it for me. My first thought was to use Windows XP search but for whatever reason, it never seems to find all of the files I’m interested in and only has a search feature, not search and replace. In that regard, I thought the Windows 2000 search function was much better. It always seemed to find what I am looking for.

I ran across a useful utility that does search and replace really well called Windows Grep. It has the usual search options including search using regular expressions, whole word matching and interestingly, also has a Soundex search which will locate all the documents that contain words that sound like a given word. It also has a replace feature that will make a backup copy of changed files, saving you some grief if your global search and replace goes a little too global.

Admittedly, finding the tool took almost as long as manually changing all of my settings files, but looking for the tool and learning how to use it was a whole lot more fun.

Lately I’ve been creating an installer for our Geocortex Optimizer product. I’ve created simple installers before using InstallShield, but I thought that this time I’d give WIX a try. After all, WIX seems to be the installer technology of choice at Microsoft these days and therefore, it seemed reasonable that WIX should suffice for Optimizer’s minimal installation needs. I estimated creating an installer for Optimizer should take 5-7 days. Our installation consists of 10-15 files, installing SQL Server Express and has a few Optimizer specific custom dialogs. 3 weeks later, the Optimizer project has an installer that works pretty well. Creating it only took 3 times longer than I anticipated but no problem. It’s the journey is what matters right? Here is what I learned.

1. There is no definitive reference for WIX. Only an MSI reference on MSDN and a number of WIX tutorials scattered about the Web. If anyone wants to write “WIX For Dummies” or “WIX unleashed”, I’m pretty sure they would make a killing. Without the book, allow a few days to read all you can about WIX and MSI.
2. Doing simple things can take an extraordinary amount of time to figure out how to do. Simple tasks such as manipulating combo boxes or enumerating SQL Servers are much more involved than you would imagine. I found that it helps if you forget everything you know about writing WinForms or Web applications and put your WIX thinking cap on from the beginning.
3. WIX has native support for editing settings files, installing Windows services and creating databases. If you find yourself writing code to perform these tasks, your approach is likely wrong.
4. Using the right tools can help you out tremendously. Editing dialog boxes using Notepad2 is not a lot of fun and very unproductive. I refused to go down that path and used the WixAware from the beginning. This was the right thing to do. InstallAware is currently in Beta and has a number of issues to work out but, it also has enough useful functionality in it to save a lot of time. I’m looking forward to their final release.