A Debugger that Doesn’t Debug

Despite all of InstallAware‘s claims of superiority, ease-of-use, and drop-dead simple compatibility and scripting capabilities compared to the competition in the market; it’s driving us crazy.

The biggest problem is the “debugger.” It’s in quotes for a reason. Take the world’s most powerful debugger, and try to debug an application that’s one big, huge “TRY” block – you’ll never get anywhere because you get a pretty error message instead. Except in our case, the message says “error,” and it leaves us to guess just where in the several hundred lines of badly-implemented scripting “MSIcode” the error is.

Even worse, if at all possible, are the breakpoints. By “break” they mean that the installer will “pause” right there – but you can’t really do anything with that pause – you can’t even access the IDE! It’s just like hitting the freeze-frame button on your Cable Box – it’s worthless.

InstallAware has a colorful history from stealing website designs to abusing the freeware communities – and you can always spot their CEO in the comments section claiming “that’s OK” because they have better products anyway. Well, it seems they don’t have even that…

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