Jerry Dennany's Occasional Clue

As promised, here is my article:

"How To extract InstallShield Dialogs from an MSI"

I had planned a post on how to extract Installshield Dialogs from an existing setup, for use with WiX, but I'll have to postpone that entry.  I had an unscheduled event take up most of my day.

(Part of a multi-part story on WiX)

I'm about to begin what I'll call the "Journey of WiX".  My intent is to chronicle my story during the next month. I will be converting a rather complicated InstallShield setup to a WiX based setup.  I'll share my trials and tribulations, along with my successes, for the next month of this project.

And I sure listened.

The two people that read my blog (besides my sister) know this already, but if you author a class library, please mark all classes deriving from Exception (or even better, ApplicationException) as [Serializable].  If I am using your library on the other side of a remoting channel, non-Serializable exceptions will cause me much heartache.

I know that there are other samples of web scraping out there, but here's mine.  One of my customers asked me how to scrape our ASP.NET Web application, so I though that I might post the example code.  I like the viewstate regex - it's my first time using lookarounds in a regular expression.

Larry Osterman and Raymond Chen are constantly pointing out that third party developers use undocumented APIs and implementation side effects of the Windows APIs, and other OS internal details.  A common refrain among developers is that such things shouldn't be done, and Microsoft shouldn't be afraid to 'break' applications that dare to use undocumented features.