Jerry Dennany's Occasional Clue

My rant for  today:

    Can anyone give a good reason why Microsoft's Installable File System Kit (IFS) costs $1000? 

    My understanding was that Microsoft was supposed to be opening APIs, not closing them with a price barrier.  If anything, IFS should be part of an MSDN subscription, just as the DDK is.

    The IFS FAQ does try to address my question (and apparently, it's a question that is asked fairly often).  However, the explanation sounds almost churlish:

Q: Why doesn't the IFS Kit get included with MSDN Universal?

A: There are a variety of reasons why the IFS Kit is not included with MSDN. The license agreement for the kit is different than the normal MSDN license for one. Though we are considering it for future releases.

Since when does license differences preclude including a product with MSDN?  The Office 2003 and SQL Server 2000 licences are wildly different, and yet both products seem to co-exist the MSDN space quite nicely.  And, what's so special about IFS that it needs a different licence from the DDK?

If you'd like to mess a bit with IFS without chunking out a cool grand, check out Bo Branten's Ntifs.h.  It's a GPL'd version of what you need to build an Installable File System.  He advises not using this in production environments, but it's a good way of getting you feet wet with IFS.

Aaron Stebner has an interesting article on MSI Resiliency, but before we get all excited about self-repairing applications, let's recognize something.  Not even Microsoft gets this one correct, so how can we expect customers and ISVs to become dependent on this feature?

For example, Windows Installer was first introduced with Office 2000, because of their incredibly complex SKU requirements.  One of the additional features that MSI introduced was the concept of self-repairing applications, otherwise referred to as application resiliency.  The problem was, that this was introduced as a cure-all, but never seems to work quite correctly.  Application resilience is the reason that you are prompted for you Office 2003 CD when you apply Office Updates from Microsoft.com.

There are other examples of where things don't seem to work quite correctly.  For example, I have a reproducible bug where if you install Visual Studio.NET, and then Installshield 8 or 9 (I haven't tried X yet..), you will be prompted for the Visual Studio.NET installation media if you attempt an installshield command line build.  What's wrong?  MSI, for some unkown reason, thinks it needs to repair VS.NET (and never does so correctly, I might add!)

The solution to this problem is to un-register and re-register mergemod.dll, usually found in "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSI Tools\mergemod.dll".

If Microsoft can't even get MSI Resiliency correct internally, how can we?

A little bit ago, someone asked for the best method to back up a windows cluster.  Instead of trying to cover all the bases myself, I'll point to this technet article:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/clustering/sercbrbp.mspx