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New year, new work

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It's nice to finally be back at work. Our whole team has basically mostly been off work since before Thanksgiving, with windstorms, snow, holidays, free days off, etc., so it's nice being back at work. It's taken all of us a few days to start to get rolling, but it's beginning to feel like we have some momentum now with our work. I know in my case I'm starting to really get ramped up on what Setup in the Windows SDK will be doing for the next few months. So I thought I'd share with you some of the slides from a deck I presented today, and talk over the next few posts about what it all means.

Most of our team's planning is centered on two releases: the Visual Studio "Orcas" release and the Windows "Longhorn" Server release. We know that we will be doing work for both releases, and we need to start getting tasks defined and spec'd for those releases. For Setup, the six top tasks are:

  • Ensuring that the version-to-version story is correct
  • Ensuring that different MSI-based install behaviors are enabled
  • Fixing important and longstanding bugs
  • Improving logging
  • Handling Localization appropriately in the LHServer timeframe
  • Ensuring that Setup is fully Accessible

In my opinion, our most important setup task is to improve our logging. It sounds dull, but it's important because a number of users are having problems with their SDK installs at odd points. For instance, in all of our internal testing we never had a setup fail early on in the detection phase. But we've seen a number of users report that exact problem. The issue is, though, that the logs don't show what's actually happening. They look completely clean except for the "Installation failed" message. I can't help but think that with better logging, we could track down the issue more easily, so that's top of the queue for the next few months.

Do any of you have opinions on what else we should concentrate on?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2007
    Lots of people know about the PSDK, but I sometimes get blank looks when I say I work on the Windows