MICHAEL said:
I expect nothing less than your defense of WMP 11, you do work
for Microsoft , after all.
Well, to be even more clear, I worked on WMP 11 (and everything between all
the way back to NetShow 1.0).
But that being said, I hated Microsoft growing up and have never had any
interest in being any sort of shill, just in sorting things out and making
them better. I try to be Microsoft-agnostic, with the net goal of making
things work, and occasionally explaining things - but THAT is boring.
Especially since it's not like anybody really cares or is going to actually
find value in my ramblings. ;-)
The best way to troubleshoot/fix most software is not available for
those that are having problems with WMP 11- uninstall/reinstall.
What would that be expected to resolve and how?
Having designed (or general major involvement with) most of the install
systems for Windows Media Player ever, etc, the "uninstall" is entirely
extraneous to a good component validation/reinstall.
As a customer, I've always felt that "uninstall/reinstall" from a vendor is
lazy. Plus I found it really annoying to have to reinstall first. WMP has
always been designed to seamlessly upgrade, and a reinstall of WMP was
designed to have extra troubleshooting properties not available otherwise.
None of that is remarkable. It's just good logical design. I appreciate
your advocacy of reinstall methods, but the "uninstall" is largely
extraneous to good software design. (The exception being a corrupt
store/table where you only are going to reset the primary known data, and
some extra data is present. But if you're removing and restoring data 1:1,
you'll never catch that anyways. And how do you make the call about what
extensible data is good or bad? I know of many vendors that add positive
value through adding settings to the player. Blah blah blah. Reinstall,
very good idea, although I don't know what you're specifically trying to
solve that couldn't be handled better in some other fashion. Uninstall,
largely unnecessary.)
Having customers reinstall the operating system to fix WMP is
really pathetic and unacceptable. You should feel that way, too-
"This is utterly regardless of which player you use."
Hey, I did work until 5AM going through 700,000 document lines getting this
data and laying the baseline/groundwork for this. I put my money where my
mouth is. =)
If that makes you angry, be angry/upset with the Vista component install
architects who hadn't added that feature. It's not an aspect that the
player team had any control of. Promise. =)
Arguably Vista here isn't substantially changed from any previous version of
Windows ever. As you're probably aware, the OC Manager could reapply a
minimal set of system components, but that was all about it. You could
hackedly run the system install INFs again after the fact to forcibly
reinstall a subset, but -- Windows was never really designed for discrete
system component reinstall. Vista's install system is disappointing in that
it lacks this feature that COULD have potentially been added, but given that
OS install / migration / upgrade is a breathtaking task, I'll forgive them.
