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Alternative solutions?
One objection to VBRegFix has been that, rather
than using this somewhat Byzantine scheme of gelded files, secret
copies and DLL inventories, why not just fix the problems in the
VB Install Wizard? Not to put too fine a point on it, but that
approach is unfortunately doomed to utter abject failure. If even
one eVB program created using the normal eVB Application Install
Wizard is uninstalled, it will clobber the shared DLLs used by
the correctly installed programs, and they will all stop working.
There are so many eVB programs already out there with faulty install
files that it's pretty hopeless at this point. It's also not at
all obvious to me how Microsoft is going to unwind this mess in
the next version of WinCE without some serious code hacking. All
those eVB programs aren't going away anytime soon, and more are
being created and released into the mostly unsuspecting world
every day.
The development community at work...
My last comment on VBRegFix is about the process
of the development of the current version (2.2). I had released
an earlier, less capable version, and, inspired by user feedback,
posted my ideas for the new version on the Usenet WinCE newsgroups.
There ensued a very useful and cordial conversation over the next
week or so that helped immensely in the development. In parallel,
some very brave souls were actually running the first versions
on their machines and reporting non-optimal behavior patterns
(ahem, bugs), and they were really good sports about it too. So
I'd like to thank John Cody and Steve Maillet for their technical
help in getting VBRegFix put together, and Roger Lo, Julio Meneses,
and Kelly Nehowig for their help and great patience in finding
bugs and vulnerabilities. This really was a community effort that
would have been pretty much impossible without the Net and its
netizens' goodwill and cooperation.
If you would like a copy of VBRegFix,
it's free at www.nca-corp.com.
Just be sure to read the Readme.htm file for how to use it and
particularly how to uninstall it. The automatic running feature
must be manually turned off if you remove VBRegFix; otherwise
you'll get obscure error messages.
[deVBuzz note]
I'm very impressed by Ralph's endeavors
with this problem and thought I would add a quick step-by-step
of how to replicate the uninstall problem.
1) install at least TWO eVB applications on
your Pocket PC
2) uninstall one of the applications using
ActiveSync's - Tools -> Add/Remove Programs
3) attempt to run one of the other eVB apps,
you will see an error message like this:
4) install and run VBRegFix
5) disconnect from ActiveSync
6) Sync to your desktop and install an eVB
using ActiveSync
7) Disconnect and re-sync (to trigger the
execution of VBRegFix)
8) Uninstall one of the eVB apps
9) Voilà! The other eVB applications
still execute correctly.
The only problem I seemed to run into was
that VBRegFix did not seem to run when I disconnected and reconnected
- so I ran it from the Start menu and it worked like a charm.
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