CadON Oy

CadON Oy

Learning web programming skills

I've always been a programmer who developes desktop applications. I already familiarized myself with HTML back in 1997 but I never really got into it. I feel it hard to design web pages. I don't have an eye for fancy UI elements or I don't know very well capabilities of script languages executed at client end.

Now I'm kind of forced to build a simple web page having a dynamic content. Page is going to be displayed inside a desktop application and as I told the content should be generated dynamically based on client making the http get request. I need to update some data to SQL Server and in addition to fetch some data from SQL Server. Page is based on old ASP technology merely because it's related to bigger solution which is implemented with ASP. I should adopt some styles in order to make fancy layout. It's better get started in order to see outcome some day...

Minor upgrade in Windows Installer does not update files

We had a problem with our product that it didn't update files of previous installation when runnning Service Pack as minor upgrade. We are using InstallShield 12 to build our setup packages. Installation itself run successfully but it left one feature in Advertised state and no files were upgraded.

When investigating install log it appeared through SELMGR messages that one component that exist in previous version were missing from feature that were left in Advertised state.

MSI (s) (88:84) [13:24:44:060]: Feature: CustomTools_Files; Installed: Advertise;

MSI (s) (88:84) [13:24:43:607]: SELMGR: ComponentId '{9EE2A7ED-8A13-0C17-B01F-C8B3B9A1E18E}' is registered to feature 'CustomTools_Files', but is not present in the Component table. Removal of components from a feature is not supported!

That was not straightforward to notice since the component was missing from VC 2008 runtime libraries included as merge modules. One merge module was updated by automatic Windows update service on our build server. I know - this is so no-no to do on build server.

By upgrade rules a major upgrade is compulsory when removing a component from a feature. After applying major upgrade the upgrade from previous service pack went fine and no features were left in Advertised state.