(Your) New Year's Resolution - Integrity!

[NewsArchive]

Like a typical member of a certain political party (I'll leave it to your
own prejudices to project which one <g>) I'm going to suggest to you a
resolution for the new year so that you will become a better person.

Not a resolution for moi, of course... as it's something I've been doing
for several years (sounds of back being patted).

The Internet is a wonderful thing (thank you, Al Gore!). But it has its
moments of caprice. And during one of those, something downloaded may go
slightly awry.

Somebody downloading your installer may experience a hiccup during download.
If he does, your installer will likely choke when he goes to run it on his
system.

Yes, if he thinks to look at the digital signature before running your
installer, he'll be able to tell there's a problem with the installer.

But how many people do that? (I purchased and downloaded an SB-installed
product some time back onto an XP machine. The download was corrupt.
Because it was XP, I didn't get an "unsigned" Vista/Win7 UAC warning screen.
I tried installing the product. It got part way through the installation
before it crashed. After I figured out what was happening and re-downloaded
the product, I couldn't install it because the crashed first attempt had
written a license file that was no longer valid. I had to contact the
vendor for help getting things sorted out.)

In that corrupt downloads will only happen to certain people under certain
circumstances, you can have just occasional customer support issues that are
hard to explain (scan back through the past year or two of such messages on
this NG for some examples). You may also have customers who try your
download as a demo, have a problem, and then just reject the product
outright.

SetupBuilder can save you these aggravations. But only if you tell it to.

I'm referring, of course, to the "Enable Installer Integrity Check" option.

The documentation says "You should use this option only when your setup will
be downloaded and run from an unreliable source such as the Internet. There
is no need to use this option for floppy or CD-ROM installs. "
Nonsense! Use it All The Time! (Have you never burned a faulty CD???)
It will slightly slow down the loading of your installer, because the
installer needs to scan itself and make sure it's intact.
(But your installer will still load 92,332.55 times faster than an MSI!!)

Over the past years, I've gotten questions every few months from somebody
saying one of my installers said its integrity check failed. It's so
convenient to know what the problem is and just to tell him to download it
again, rather than wasting time chasing phantoms.

I wish this were turned on by default in SB, but it isn't. So I suggest you
make it a habit to turn it on each time you create a new project.

So be good, and maintain your integrity ;-)

Jane