ViEmu Blog

I just built & uploaded ViEmu/Word&Outlook 1.0.24, and made this the ‘official’ 1.0 release at the same time (that is, if you go to the ViEmu home page and click ‘download’, this is the build you’ll get). The ViEmu code itself is the same (with just a new 1.0.24 version tag), only the installer has changed.

The fix to the installer is to make it write ViEmu’s COM class registration info to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. The original behavior could sometimes result into ViEmu not loading in Word & Outlook at all, when installing under Vista. It was weird, and difficult to figure out. Only after I could reproduce it in the new Vista laptop I got last week I could properly investigate it. It turns out that, under Vista, entries written to HKCR are redirected to the per-user HKEY_CURRENT_USER, unlike under XP. I believe that Word should still work fine, but it seems sometimes doesn’t. The design behind the registry, the Windows installer, the COM architecture itself, and the Word add-in model are so bad that you never know what may be happening. Anyway, this shouldn’t happen anymore with the updated installer.

I don’t know why this happens in some Vista systems and not on others (actually, it just works fine most of the time). I won’t bother to investigate the exact reason, as the new installer system makes sure that registry entries are written to the best place and the whole issue is sidestepped (and I’m not keen on investigating Vista’s quirks more than strictly necessary).

In the next few days, I will prepare an updated ViEmu/SQL installer with the same fix. ViEmu/VS is unaffected because it’s a VS ‘package’, rather than an add-in, which doesn’t use the regular COM registration mechanism.

By the way, I’ve started using Vista full time on my laptop. General impressions are good, the fact that VS.NET 2003 is not supported and freezes as soon as I do a “Find in Files” is not nice. I will move all my projects to build using VS2005 at some point in the next few weeks, but for now I’m doing pure development inside an XP VM. VS.NET 2003 has remaind nice & stable and I just prefer not to upgrade unless there is a really compelling reason.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.