Thursday, January 10, 2008

Xheo-du

Well, I think I have enough Xheo to get me started working on other aspects of my license server. It was not easy and the documentation did not really help. In the end I had to show the license registration dialog or the registration information just was not sent to the server (even though there were default values and the registration method was called). I don't pretend to understand everything about DeployX, but I have enough continue.

I think this underscores the problem with Microsoft's help format. Help is cut up into a hierarchical collection of factoids and it is very difficult to read linearly (i.e. there is no start and there is no end, so in general you can only read a snippet of the available documentation). Why can't someone produce a nice PDF from an existing VS2005 help file (or maybe somebody can?...).

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Xheo Shmeo

I have found a name for my pain. I call it Xheo DeployX . I have been working on a new license server for about the past month and I am really at my wits end. It is rare that I come to such a point in a project, but I would like to give up.

For those of you who don't know Deployx is a software license package for .NET. It is very complete with a lot of features and is also very expensive. We would like to use it to write our own centralize licensing server so that corporate users could simplify deployment (and we could get paid for what we are doing - a big change). Unfortunately it is a black box and a brick sXXt house. I don't know how it works, I don't know how it is supposed to work if it did work. I don't know when it is working and when it is not working. All I know is that is it not doing what I hoped it would do.

The documentation is minimal and the support staff surly (when they answer at all). If there were any other product that might be able to do my job I would have bought it.

Depression... depression... depression.