Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Installing Silverlight 1.0: Follow-up

analysis
Sep 12, 20071 min

In response to what I discussed yesterday, a Microsoft employee has pointed out that my Visual Studio 2005 project and template directories were not set to the defaults. If they had been set to the defaults, the Silverlight JavaScript application template would have installed to the right place. There are two issues here: 1. My non-default directories were a result of being a Visual Studio 2005 alpha and beta te

There are two issues here:

1. My non-default directories were a result of being a Visual Studio 2005 alpha and beta tester. It’s not like I changed them. This is an old Microsoft bug come back to haunt us.

2. An installation that assumes default directories is doing the wrong thing. The right way to do any add-on installation is to query the existing configuration for the correct directories. If the installation was never tested against a non-default case, the QA was inadequate. I’d forgive this for a beta or RC version, but this was the released Silverlight 1.0 SDK. (“10 points from Gryffendor, and report to me for detention,” said Snape, curling his lip.)

Nevertheless, I’ve updated my VS05 directories to the defaults and copied all my projects and templates over from the old directories. I don’t have any need to play guinea pig for Microsoft, or any other software tools vendor, more than absolutely necessary.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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