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Problems With Developer 7


9 replies to this topic

Ribbotson

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Posted 20 September 2001 - 22:24

I'm not the only person to find problems with Installshield 7, but what do the rest of you think about it?

I am deploying MDAC 2.6, MSDE, BDE, and various other components, and have encountered several problems with each of them.  Since I am an hourly paid contractor, I don't mind too much but there seem to be more problems than in other versions.

What do you think?


pdriley

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Posted 21 September 2001 - 13:33

I've said a lot elsewhere on this forum, the rants dotted all over the place and a thread of positive comments as well, so I'm not going to rehash.

I will agree with you that the Merge Modules are a serious problem.  The ones that are specifically built using WI methodology aren't so bad, but those IS ones that just wrap a non-WI installer (MDAC, Jet, etc) are nothing short of useless.

I've found that the best approach is to just fudge them :)

But then all this was true of ISWi as well, it hasn't got worse it just hasn't improved at all.  A lot of other things have improved (I would give my left arm for a proper way of handling ModuleXxxSequence tables though) and all-in-all ISD 7 is a step in the right direction.

Like the Final Fantasy series, I strongly look forward to version 10 ;)


bzimmo

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Posted 26 September 2001 - 01:09

I have had nothing but trouble with ISD 7. Hung IDE, exceptions, etc.
For the amount of money InstallShield charge for their products, it is not unreasonable to expect a stable IDE.



pdriley

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Posted 26 September 2001 - 18:53

I haven't had the IDE hang as such.  I have had it memory leak which is a bit dodgy and I've had plenty of exceptions, though mainly on shut-down after everything's saved.

Simon

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Posted 02 October 2001 - 14:43

I think Developer 7 has more problems than any of the previous products IS have rolled out.  This one does both MSI and Script jobs in one so it can't be an easy thing to do.  I do feel like a beta tester and not a final user.

Christof

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Posted 02 October 2001 - 15:52

I feel like a beta test too. Many bugs and problems in all parts of the program.
I read in the "offical" InstallShield newsgroup that there will be a Service Release within the next 4 weeks.
Hope this will solve many of our problems...

CimTeam

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Posted 10 December 2001 - 16:17

I although have more than enough problems.
Until now, there is no change to get a running
version of our installation under Developer.

The structures of the directory table is complete
destroyed after upgrading.

If someone wan't to crash down - no problem. Just
do a string search at the new direct editor.
It always crashes at the end of a search.


mdoggett

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Posted 13 December 2001 - 15:21

I have had nothing but problems with IS7

- The Dialog editor keeps losing information about the dialogs.
- There are errors (By Installshields own admission) in the documentations which means you have to waste time calling their support team to be told that if the documentation was correct you wouldn't have spent ages trying to get some of the features working
- Sometimes Developer seems to randomly decide whether to install some features or not. The only way to stop this happening was to recreate the project from scratch

There are loads more issues that have made me go back to 6.31 as I needed to release some software and I am not convinced that this product is stable enough to send to clients.

IS7 (even with the maintennance pack) is no better than a Beta release. Having said that I have tried some of Microsofts beta releases and even they are more stable than this. I would urge anyone using this product NOT to use it for production installations until Installshield can get their act together.

My Company spent a lot of money upgrading to this release and we now feel completely hard done by.

I hope someone from Installshield reads this as I'm sure this echoes the thoughts of many installshield Developers. If Microsoft released software of the shoddy standards of IS7 there would be an uproar. This must not be allowed to happen. I think a partial refund to comensate companies for all the lost development time in trying to get this product to work would be a step in the right direction to fix this mess.


mandrews

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Posted 13 December 2001 - 17:04

Agreed.

In the eternal war between engineering and marketing, apparently marketing won this round - and released the product way before it was ready.

Probably the only real option is to return it for a refund or wait for the patches...

InstallShield had better watch their butts on that stuff though.

If a company builds something with Developer, releases it, and it blows up for major clients on account of Developer, then InstallShield could have lawsuits on their hands.


Christof

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Posted 13 December 2001 - 17:04

Hi mdoggett,
every word you say is true.
A lot of problems here too.
Last week I went back to 6.22 because I have to come to results.
My biggest problem is the fact that feature / components will not be installed to folders other then defined in the component destination. This is absolut horror, it is one of the basic functions of all my setup scripts to set ComponentSetTarget to a user defined folder.
Still feeling like a beta tester.

Greetings
Christof