Prepare deployment by reading these two thousand pages

Some companies think their product is the best. It's da bomb as they might say, if bombing was a positive thing for software to do.

They think their product is such a gift to humanity they expect you to read through dozens or hundreds of pages even to just get past the EULA.

This might be fine for the user who purchased the application who then spend days excitingly exploring this new wonderous program.

It is not fine at all for the application deployer who has 550 other applications to manage and can't spend his full time job just on your special snowflake and don't give a shit about how great it is, or even what it does or why. Yes, 550 is the actual number of applications that I manage.

This is the Oracle Database Client Installation Guide. Also available as PDF it is 84 painfully boring pages, and yet when it comes to the most critical part of the installation, what components to include or not include, all it says is;

If you selected Custom as the type of installation in step 4, then the Available

Product Components screen is displayed. Select the products that you want to

install and click Next. 

What? How the fuck am I supposed to know what "Product Components" that "I want"? I don't want to install anything, I have to. What I want is to know what the fuck I have to install and why. Do my clients need "Oracle SQLJ"? How am I supposed to know that?

What I want. Apparently.

This is the Deployment guide for Office 365 ProPlus. Who on Earth has the time to read that through? Does it say anything about how licensing works on shared computers? I don't know because there is too much text.

The Overview: Deploying Creative Cloud for enterprise starts with a seven and a half minute long video. That is the overview. The full guide is found here with more pages than I care to count.

A deployment guide should consist of a single page. This is what I need to know:

• Prerequirements. Do your program require some other program?
• What the components are for and which are required.
• How to configure the install. If it's an MSI, use properties.
• What the error codes mean. ALL of them.

That is it. Most companies fail on all but the first bullet point and many even fail on that one.

What do these companies think I do at work all day long?

Not working, that's what.

Globally Unique Identifier

Globally Unique Identifier is a genious thing when you need a globally unique identifier! They are not as brilliant when they are used everywhere you would need a human-readable name, because of laziness.

If you've ever been troubleshooting a Windows program, and you have if you are reading this blog, you are fully aware of the frustration you feel trying to find the associated file from a class identifier in the registry or when figuring out which program C:\Windows\Installer\{136688F1-EF42-414E-92D6-BFF4D25EE688}\ARPPRODUCTICON.exe belongs to.

Usually you just copy the GUID into the clipboard and paste it into an appropriate search box. Isn't obvious that {25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13} is the CLSID for "Browse in place"?

It doesn't help then, at all, that there are two ways of storing the GUID, either normally or compressed. And by "compressed" I mean "not really compressed, just a little different to annoy people and make their life harder".

How to convert between a standard and a compressed GUID:

Have you seen anything dumber than this, lately?

Also note that the "Browse in place" GUID, usually found under keys such as HKCR\htmlfile or HKCR\jpegfile, have two lowercase letters for no reason. It's likely true on your Windows too. To be truly globally unique, GUIDs should be generated by an algorithm standardized by ISO, IEC or someone with power to standardize. I am not sure, but I doubt the algorithm is inconsistent with upper and lower case.

Sometimes it is obvious the GUID is not random, as in the case with Microsoft Office;

The product code for Office consists of it's version and language and such, ending in "0FF1CE" as Microsoft describes here. My Office 2016 Pro has a GUID of  {90160000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}.

Older Java clients had class IDs starting with "CAFE"; {CAFEEFAC-0013-0000-0003-ABCDEFFEDCBA}, or maybe it should read "Café fuck", because that is how I read it.

Finding the product code for an msi install is trivial when the program is already installed, but often you would like to avoid littering your computer, even your virtual one, with garbage unless you really have to.

I wrote a tool to list the product codes of all msi files in a folder, and also put them in the clipboard for easy pasting into your uninstall-script. Download it here.

If you don't dare to download unknown programs and run them on your computer you are not an application deployer.

What version is this?

Everybody hates versioning. Everybody.

You can easily tell this by the fact that nobody does it unless forced to do so, and mostly not even then.

There is a long and very boring Wikipedia-page about versioning but let me sum it up for you without ever having read it. Your software should have a version number in a format like this:

major.minor.build.revision

Swap build and revision if you like, or disregard them altogether, but keep your major and minor versions consistent! However, there have never been a program that follows this scheme successfully over several versions during it's existence. Let me give some examples:

Windows 10 Version 1709 is version 10.0.16299.192. Windows 8 is version 6.

Java Development Kit 7 for Java 7 is not version 7 but 1.7.0.0.

Two different and incompatible ocx-files with the same name and version, from the last century but somehow still in use in some programs today. That is good work, mr McMahon, but you obviously hate versioning as much as everyone else!

This office plugin is either version 10 or version 1.0.10 depending on who you ask. About Office; Office 2003 is version 11, Office 2007 is version 12, 2010 is version 14. I see what you did there, Microsoft, you don't want any bad luck! But how the hell am I supposed to remember that version 15 is Office 2013? Finally version 16 is actually Office 2016, but then again, Office 365 is ALSO version 16!

Some of the many, many, many vc-redists required, it quickly becomes ridiculous. When you get an error and the Event viewer tells you that Microsoft.VC80.MFC is missing, you immediately know you need to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable, don't you?

I think I got my point across.

Happy versioning!