Ionrock Dot Org

Yesterday I finally finished up an installer for an application I wrote. Making an installer really is pretty easy when you are just installing your own application. The problem comes when you have to tap into other resources on the other machine. In my case I had to make sure there was FrameMaker installed and see what version was installed. This was a hassle to say the least. What was most surprising to me was that you could not debug the installer. It is funny because in the past, using a debugger was not very natural for me. Print statements and logs have always gotten me through the day without many problems but, after working in Visual Studio and C#, I have gotten used to having a debugger.

My work around to the debugging issues was to make a mock installer project and debug the portions that needed debugging outside of a real installer. This worked alright, but overall, I thought it should be possible to use Visual Studio to run and debug an installer. It seems I have come to expect too much from dear Microsoft.