philipnet

Well today I created, tested and swore at a package to uninstall the old M.I.S. software and fix Quick Address Pro.

It turns out that the old M.I.S. software won’t uninstall cleanly when run under SMS, generating 1605 errors in the Event logs. That’s no great surprise considering the fudge we have to do to get it to work in the first place!

So then I re-examined the fix for Quick Address Pro. It turns out that the DLL used in the trials last week (whilst I was away) dated from 1999 and was probably pulled out of the copy of the Quick Address Pro software archive on the server. However the same DLL was supplied with the old M.I.S. software and was dated much later – 2004 in fact. So in my trials I copied the newer DLL into the system32 folder, and low and behold no re-installation of the old software.

So that’s what I’ve done. And I also updated the package for the software to include this DLL.

I guess there’s a lesson to be learned here, but I’m not sure what. Perhaps it’s that over worked and under paid people won’t test things properly? Or that I should trust my gut instinct more often? Either way, I’m more prepared for future repackaging issues.