I like to keep our applications Strong Named for a multitude of reason which can make finding third party assembly's a pain.  As simple as strong naming is many vendors are to lazy or ignorant to sign the assembly.  Friday I left the office with some unsigned enterprise library DLLs, being lazy I didn't want to recompiling them my strong name signature.  Thankfully I found a nifty little app by Alois Kraus that will add a strong names to unsigned assemblies.  I also happened upon a tool for removing a strong name from codeproject.  Not sure when it would be of use.

Let me start by saying I hate InstallShield,  this probably isn't fair there was a time when I liked them back in the day when the name of the product matched the name of the company they were small and focused.  They installed software and it made life easy.  Now MacoVision has different ideas and IMHO ruined the InstallShield the product. 

I started the other day by reading Shahine's blog regarding InstallShield updater,  he found a nice resource to remove this product.  The trouble is, InstallShield updater keeps coming back.  Case inpoint yesterday evening I saw Steve's post about Nikon's RAW codex in vista so having a Nikon D50 I went and happily down loaded and installed the codex.  This morning I see that installation has once again turned on Install Shield Updater.  I tend to agree with Shahine I hate updaters the only one I don't really mind is windows update (in vista it's almost nice).  On the other hand I have to give credit to MacoVision the idea of one common update framework/resource is compelling(They charge an arm and leg for it though).  But These things should never be silently installed behind the users back.  Getting your customers to stay uptodate is a very difficult problem, I don't think a unique solution per company is the right choice but InstallShield updater sure comes up wanting.

ps,

This was my first post from windows live writer.  My initial impression is the spell check could be much better.

One of my coworkers sent me note regarding pagination and Nettiers.

Saw your post:

  Easy server side pagination

If you haven’t noticed, Nettiers does automatic pagination at the stored proc and middle tier levels

This is true and I have noticed this before(all be it on a back-end web-server that didnt need paging), but there are still some projects that are not using Nettiers were the SQL stored procedure will help and there are always the cases that Netteirs doesn't write stored procedures for you. 

I got the new Logitech driver (I prefer unobtrusive generic drivers when posible)(I wonder how the XP driver will work on Vista).

You can also try remapping the forwared and back buttions to ALT+LEFT and ALT+RIGHT

If you like to write client side pagination because its so easy, its time to change that.  Irena's stored procedure for Easy Pagination in SQL

The LazyBastard is at it again, check out his latest contribution to the ReplayTV scene.  WiRNS-RSS

Here is an interesting new beta Microsoft has been working on Relay Service they also have a blog.  The only trouble is you need a windows cardspace to download an sdk.  Since I am still unsure as how i can carry this identity between a multitude of computers, I don't have one and thus cannot down load there sdk.

If you receive the following message from visual studio 2003

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Microsoft Development Environment
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Project .vcproj' failed to open.
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OK  
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you can open your *.vcprog file with your favorite xml editor and find the "/VisualStudioProject/References/AssemblyReference" nodes make sure all the paths and files are valid.  One will not be, remove it or edit the path save the file and now open it in Visual Studio.