Most Alumni Have The Opposite Problem…

I don’t think I’m going to be able to wear my iron ring much longer. Three or four times now in the last week it’s just slid right off while I was in the middle of doing something, and it’s only a matter of time before it falls into the garbage/toilet/drain/etc.

It’s questionable whether I even really have the right to continue wearing it, as I haven’t gone for the proper P.Eng. title yet. Software work doesn’t require it, and I’d be hard-pressed to justify my recent work as ‘engineering’ anyway. Still, I did take the Oath, and it still serves as a reminder of that regardless of what little pieces of paper I have…

Yesterday’s (belated) lesson:

I’d always thought of the C++ ‘using’ keyword just as a shortcut for specifying default namespaces, but apparently it has other uses too. If a derived class has a member which has the same name as a member in the base class it will ‘hide’ the base class’s version, even if they take different parameters. If you still want to use the version in the base class, you can stick ‘using Base::member_name;’ in the derived class definition and it’ll make the base class’s version accessible again.

Today’s lesson:

It’s apparently not safe to preset registry keys in the OnFirstUIBegin phase of an InstallScript. I had it set up to install a registry key to a default value if one didn’t already exist (the ‘Automatic’ setting in the component settings), but if the user specified a custom value as part of the configuration, I’d set it in the registry before it added the default keys. Then it would see that I’ve already got one there and leave it, since it’s only supposed to add the default value if it doesn’t exist, right?

Wrong, it goes ahead and overwrites it anyway. Apparently InstallShield decides ahead of time which keys it’s going to install, and any changes you make between then and the actual install phase will be lost. Or something, it’s often not clear just what InstallShield is deciding to do under the covers.

So instead I now have the user configuration phase set a Windows Installer property to the value of the key that I want, and use a [PROPERTY]-type specifier for the registry key’s value, and that seems to work. Except now I have to make it work in the administration mode’s Modify path, too…