Locust in glass


This is the best picture my wife has taken. At the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science.
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Inno Setup MSVC vcredist without bothering your users

If your C++ program is compiled with MS Visual Studio 2005 Express, and you link with the DLL versions of the C run-time libraries, you probably already know that you have to run vcredist_x86.exe to install those dependencies on a new computer before your program will run.

Here's how to do that in an Inno Setup script.
First, download vcredist_x86.exe from MSDN, Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
Notice that's for SP1, the instructions are different for non-SP1, and for the vcredist_x86.exe that comes with Visual Studio Standard or Professional. See the credit link below.

Include this in your script:

[Files]
Source: {src}\bin\vcredist_x86.exe; DestDir: {app}\bin\;

[Run]
Filename: {app}\bin\vcredist_x86.exe; Parameters: "/q:a /c:""VCREDI~3.EXE /q:a /c:""""msiexec /i vcredist.msi /qn"""" """; WorkingDir: {app}\bin; StatusMsg: Installing CRT...


Alternative for x64 ( I haven't teste…
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Inno Setup custom data directory location

In my last post, I forgot to point you to Inno Setup; go get the Inno Setup QuickStart Pack to get going.
I showed how to copy a directory full of data, like tutorials or sample data, that might change depending on the customer. That means the files are not known when the installer is compiled.

Here's what it looked like:
Source: {src}\data\*; DestDir: C:\MyCompany\data;
   Flags: external recursesubdirs skipifsourcedoesntexist onlyifdoesntexist uninsneveruninstall;
   Permissions: users-modify

This time, I 'm going to show how to let the user choose where this directory is located, and whether to install the contents of the directory at all.

First, let's show an obvious choice:

Source: {src}\data\*; DestDir: {userdocs}\MyCompany\data; Flags: [as above....]

That new constant will put the data in a subdirectory of My Documents, for the user that installs the program. This might be fine for you, if each user of your program is going to install it themselves, and generate thei…
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Review: Javascript, The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford

I'm convinced  "JavaScript, The Good Parts" is one of the best JavaScript books for JavaScript doubters, especially those coming from a traditional object-oriented language like me. It really addresses whether JavaScript is just a mess (it definitely has messy parts) or whether there is something good in there. I'm convinced that by avoiding some problematic parts of the language, there is a very useful, functional language core that can express some interesting use-patterns.

One of the cool concepts emphasized is that JavaScript has object-inheritance, not class-inheritance. There are no classes. Instead, you can inherit from an object. Something that looks like a class is actually just an object that you essentially make copies of and use in a consistent way.

One of the implications is there are mixin/inheritance patterns that can't be expressed in Java/C++ that you can do in JavaScript. I haven't gotten my head around when they might be the best way to do …
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