It was a really nice father's day today: My smiling girls, the sweet cards and presents, the bacon wrapped Fillet Mignon and best of all, being given a pass to go enjoy some free time without the responsibilities of parenthood.
So what better to do on an afternoon off then to sit at a Starbucks for 5 hours chit chatting with the founder of InstallAware, Sinan Karaca. We both went into extreme detail over practically every aspect of the installation space.... way too much to write about here. I think a lot of good information flowed and I've come to realize that the two of us actually disagree on very few topics. I'm looking forward to see if InstallAware decides to implement a few of my thoughts in WiXAware and I'm equally interested in seeing if I can fit WiXAware into my installation solutions.
Either way it was a very productive session and as always, I always enjoy meeting with people who have an interest in setup. If you find yourself in Austin, feel free to look me up.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteCan you let us know what ideas/thoughs you hope WiXAware might implement?
Tim.
Many of the thoughts were rehashes of concepts that I've described here on my blog but shown in detail rather then high level. There were someideas regarding how a component wizard should be behave with various improvements compared to current wizards, the importance of VS integration and MSBuild support, the importance of fragments/msm's for supporting multiple build configurations in a product line development situation and how setup.exe bootstrappers need to evolve to a whole new level. Many of these reccomendations are not tool specific but more showing the user story that needs to be supported.
ReplyDeleteThere were also some WiXAware specific reccomendations but I'd like to keep those between myself and Sinan.
Very interesting, Chris. Did the question of business ethics come up at all? InstallAware has had some really bad press recently...caught stealing other installer website designs, then using those situations to showboat, which seems a bit dirty. It would be interesting to hear what Sinan had to say about that in person that would convince you he was worth spending 5 hours with.
ReplyDeleteWe don't learn a thing by *not* talking to each other, so good for you.
ReplyDelete