Weather took a really severe turn for the worse – it SNOWED! Not sticking enough to shovel, but we’ll see what the morning brings. More tidbits:
Jon Udell wrote this piece a couple of years ago: A Perl Hacker in the Land of Python, but I enjoyed it. Also, an interesting piece with a business case for open source: Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!.
Finally a little contribution to the world:
In issue #7.06 of Woody’s Office Watch, Woody said about Service Pack 1 to Office XP:
“Don’t even try to run Visual NET on your Office development machine until you’ve installed this baby.”
Would that I had know that a little bit sooner. Apparently, there’s a right way and a wrong way to install these things, and I’m about 14 hours into trying variations of the wrong way in hopes of tripping on the right way.
I’ve got a test laptop I thought I’d install all the latest MSDN Galactic toys on, to have a machine I could afford to risk crashing-and-burning, so I could evaluate the latest goodies for my company and clients. Little did I know…
I installed Windows XP and all of the requisite services packs and security patches, courtesy of Windows Update. Next was Visual Studio .NET, Visual FoxPro? 7 and Visual SourceSafe? 6.0c. Then came Office XP and it’s service packs. All seemed good, until I tried to access Visual Studio .NET. No joy. The error message “The application cannot start” lead me to MSKB 306905, which tells me there could be any one of three problems, and no clue how to tell which. So, I start at the beginning, patching MSMXL2, 3 and 4, unregistering DLLS and registering keys in the Registry, tracing down paths of obscure DLLS, doing a “Repair” installation of Office XP (hours pass…) and finally registering an OLB that seems to solve the problem. The IDE starts.
And the help doesn’t work.
So, back to the drawing board, I uninstall Visual Studio .NET and attempt a reinstall. Browsing through the voluminous README, I do come across the section that mentions that NET ought to be installed after Office XP.
Bingo! Right combination! Everything works.
Only twenty hours of toying with it down the drain. Sheesh.