IIS Diagnostics Toolkit a la carte nears release, Third Time the Charm?
Ok... getting the IIS Diagnostics Toolkit a la carte MSIs released is really becoming a full blown soap opera that never wants to end. I last mused about it in this blog entry, and all I can say now is that despite having no development work done on it since February, it is still standing on deck.
The candidate build ended up having some problems with WFetch and missing help files, and getting that fixed with NO dedicated resources can take a while... :-) Things finally wrapped up last week, and we eventually got another candidate build with the fixes in it... and now it is bottlenecked on Chris doing some final verifications (again)... and of course, Chris is busy with many other things right now, so I have no ETA.
Sigh... I am looking at the signed MSIs right now, waiting for validation before it can get to downloads.microsoft.com and to be announced. There has to be a better way to do this...
As the consequence of an identity crisis, one of the ironic problems that the IIS team faces is that despite being a web server product, we have no web presence. We are not in charge of our destiny and hosting our own website on IIS7 anywhere.
Thus, in order to do simple things like provide files for download, we have to do it from downloads.microsoft.com... which means that we have to jump through many hoops and that just slows down progress.
Now, if the IIS team has its own web presence to host our own content, including file downloads... we may have a better chance to improve on the experience. For certain, I would not need to do administrivia like converting my working build system into an alternate system (like Windows OOB) just so that we can PAY someone else to push the big red button to satisfy some checkbox before getting onto downloads.microsoft.com. Hmm, why don't we just pay me instead; that probably would have solved the problem quickly, and everyone is happy. Nah. That would be thinking way too outside the box for these folks. ;-)
//David