This Week on C9: Netflix, Extension Methods, Debugging, oh my

I'm not sure I would classify potential customers as "incredibly dense", but it was just regular Vista. Maybe they changed it to using a new wallpaper with a build number in the corner
Amen, couldn't agree more, Wix is good if you have the time to learn it, but so many shops are instead using paying for installers (Wise, Installshield, etc)
I'd push the aspiration a bit further and say we should have xcopy installation for Visual Studio (see Eclipse).
I'd also add that if we can add xcopy installation for VS, let's build out the technology/framework/tools so that
*anyone* can build xcopy applications (see Apple).
I'd also throw in that we need a much more flexible way to update software (see Firefox updater).
I didn't mean to offend, I was trying to be humorous about the absurdity of blowing off an important bug. As someone who did lose data personally from Windows Home Server, I know how bad it is!
If an application is xcopyable, you can distribute it through Active Directory as well. I agree with you that application updates are key too, I want xcopy deployment and auto-updates. I want to be able to copy all my apps onto a USB drive and paste them
onto a new PC and have everything "just work."
I don't know, I lost stuff due to that bug, but I figured I could see the tongue-in-cheekness there.
I agree with you that it's work, but I'd like the work to not be on porting VS, but rather enabling Reg-free, Xcopy-able COM. No re-writes, no degradation in features (per user settings still work), etc
I'm not saying I know how it should be built(clearly some general purpose abstraction layer for COM and the registry though), but rather that we do need it and every Windows application could benefit by making it "just work."
What I get frustrated by is that we attempt to instead make incremental improvements versus making big bets to completely overhaul something that is painful to all Windows developers. Worse yet, there are plenty of examples (Apple, Firefox, etc) where we could
dramatically overhaul our installer technology.