Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility

For those we lost, We will not forget 09/11/2001

“Our God given unalienable rights are given to us all as individuals. They tell us what we may do for ourselves, and they are the embodiment of liberty. The so-called rights that government gives to some of us are parcelled out to select groups as classes. They tell us what one class of people may require another to do for them, and they are the very essence of slavery.”
— Perri Nelson, February 9, 2010

A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?

One-click deployment... NOT!

Published Fri, Jan 11 2008 11:02 AM
Technorati Tags: Software Development

As a few of you might know, I make my living writing .NET applications. I also write them as a hobby.

A few months ago I wrote some screen-scrapers for a few of my friends on BlogShares. I decided to use the "one-click" deployment feature built into Visual Studio. That turned out to be a disaster.

Several people tried installing the programs. Only one was successful, and that only after much hand-holding. Eventually, I wrote up a document explaining the first of the programs and how to get it installed. Even with this hand-holding, the program wouldn't install on some machines.

One-click deployment might seem like a cool thing, but if you can't get it to work with one click it seems to me to be a bust.

So why the rant? Well, I was thinking the other day about sharing my electro-mechanical computer simulation with another of my BlogShares friends. He's one of the developers for BlogShares and we were talking about old computers.

Anyway, after considering the problems with one-click deployment and installing .NET applications on other peoples machines, I decided to remove all of the external dependencies from the simulation.

I'm re-writing the entire application in C++, and I'll be using the raw WIN32 API. The application should be smaller, and very easy to install. It'll also be just a tiny bit faster, but not much. The real bottleneck is in getting the output to display smoothly.