Archive for April, 2010
In a couple of weeks the CoApp Design & Development Summit that will take place here at Microsoft, I’ll have 15 or so people from around the world to thrash thru my some of my crazy ideas regarding package management on Windows. Scheduling this even has slowed down discussions on the CoApp mailing list—which is [...]
I figured I’d take a quick break, and review the fine wisdom my old pappy has imparted to my blog: Like my pappy always used to tell me “It may not be the easy way, but it’s the cowboy way.” … Well, WinSxS may not be the easy way (yet!), but it will most [...]
(cross-posted from the mailing list) Windows Side-by-side (WinSxS) technology is a really shiny piece of technology that is not well enough understood, and often misused. This comes from a variety of reasons, one of which is the documentation—while quite excellent—only makes sense if you actually understand everything about WinSxS before hand. When I started brainstormin’ [...]
(cross-posted from the mailing list) We had a discussion on the mailing list about maintaining a Symlink to the most recent version of a particular library, and this was of some concern. The installation directory (where libraries and their associated files) are installed has absolutely zero effect on binding choices for picking up the actual [...]
(cross-posted to the mailing list) I’m answering this in a one-off manner a little too often, so I’ll dump it all here. Q: What is Code Signing? A: For the long-winded answer, check out Wikipedia’s article on Code Signing. All that aside, it’s a way of attaching a cryptographic signature to a binary (EXE, [...]
(cross-posted to the mailing list) Since I’ve been jumping all around the map on answering questions, I wanted to first jump into the heart of what CoApp really fixes, and we’ll work our way out from there. Libraries (static or dynamic) are the heart and soul of pretty much all software—and open source is no [...]
So, I’ve been taking questions as to how CoApp packages get built. Lemme see if I can sketch out the vision for you, so that you get an idea of where it’s going. This isn’t set in stone, but I’ve actually validated this is a workable solution. And, before we get too far, let [...]
Last week, I blog’d about a new open source project that I’ve launched called “CoApp” (The Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform). As I’ve mentioned on the project site, “CoApp aims to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools [...]
