Almost there...

I think I finally have my development VPC back up to snuff.  Installing SW can be so tedious (not in the “painstaking” way, but in the “is this going to finish any time this week” sort of way).  Having a USB2.0 drive that has a finicky connector doesn’t help.

I’m heading back in time to the glamorous world of VB6.  The Outlook PCS plug-in I mentioned earlier is written in VB6 (yes, Microsoft itself actually used that development platform).  The first order of business is to fix the installer which does not correctly recognize the presence of Outlook 2003.  If you have anything from a previous Office version install, it seems to work.  The workaround is to extract the MSI from the install package and run it – it is the bootstrapper that seems to do the checking.

I’m kicking around ideas with what to do with OPCS.  Along with the source I inherited a bunch of feature requests.  I may spend the time to port it to .NET – or even ATL, as I’m been looking for a good sample to hone my ATL skills on.  I haven’t looked at the Outlook extensions market lately to see how .NET friendly it is.  My favorite extension, NewsGator, is .NET and according to Greg, they haven’t taken too much flack for it.  As much as I’d like to think everyone has the Framework deployed, I am a realist.

One last thing – I stumbled across a cool music site – BeatPort.  A pay-per-track sort of place that specializes in Dance/DJ.  The prices are a bit steep for my taste - $1.49/track, but it’s a lot of stuff you won’t find outside of specialty shops and your local club.  Back in college, I used to have a $50/wk music habit and have the obscured CD’s and white-labels vinyls to show for it.  The highlight of the week used to be when the Cargo Records fax came into my pusher local record store.  If this place was around in the early 90’s, I’d have bee in serious trouble.