Noise from the Basement

Do you remember VB Commenter?  Probably not because all the cool kids, like you, where using C# so you had no need for it.  See, way back in the Visual Studio 2003 era only .NET’s favorite child, C#, had support for XML comments.  Some jealous VB.NET developer (sorry, can’t remember who) wanted VB.NET to be just as cool so VB Commenter addin was created.

Still back in the Visual Studio 2003 era I created rules engine where the end user could script their own rules and hook them into their business application.  The rules referenced pre-compiled business objects.  To create documentation for the end user about these objects I used VB Commenter along with NDoc to generate a MSDN help file.

My latest task has been getting Mini-Compressor to work on Windows 7.  In the end no code changes are actually required to get Mini-Compressor working on Windows 7 but the installer required a bit of work.  The amount of work was actually minimal but it turned into a big pain because I didn’t document the installer and had to relearn a couple key points.  To prevent this from happening again I thought I’d better take some notes on the problems I encountered and share them with you dear reader.  That way you won’t make the same mistakes I made twice.