Perri Nelson's Website 

One-click deployment... NOT!

As a few of you might know, I make my living writing .NET applications. I also write them as a hobby.

A few months ago I wrote some screen-scrapers for a few of my friends on BlogShares. I decided to use the "one-click" deployment feature built into Visual Studio. That turned out to be a disaster.

Several people tried installing the programs. Only one was successful, and that only after much hand-holding. Eventually, I wrote up a document explaining the first of the programs and how to get it installed. Even with this hand-holding, the program wouldn't install on some machines.

One-click deployment might seem like a cool thing, but if you can't get it to work with one click it seems to me to be a bust.

So why the rant? Well, I was thinking the other day about sharing my electro-mechanical computer simulation with another of my BlogShares friends. He's one of the developers for BlogShares and we were talking about old computers.

Anyway, after considering the problems with one-click deployment and installing .NET applications on other peoples machines, I decided to remove all of the external dependencies from the simulation.

I'm re-writing the entire application in C++, and I'll be using the raw WIN32 API. The application should be smaller, and very easy to install. It'll also be just a tiny bit faster, but not much. The real bottleneck is in getting the output to display smoothly.

When it's finished, I'll post a link to the installer here.