Registry pollution

I am just astounded at the HUNDREDS of Registry keys that Aspose installs into the registry. Every file, every icon, every font in every demo has its own keys in the Registry. This is just unfathomable to me. In addition, I cannot understand why a .NET assembly must have an MSI installer. I’m having a Registry corruption problem, and because of all this silly installation-into-the-Registry stuff, I cannot even get the new assemblies onto my hard drive. For the love of G*d, wasn’t the point of .NET to leave the Registry in the dust? Aaaaaaagggghhhh!

Sorry to hear its causing problems. We never heard of this before.

MSI is needed for a number of reasons.

One of the reasons is to automatically create virtual IIS directories for the ASP.NET demos. Without this the rate of users downloading Aspose components and successfully running web demos was close to zero and complains and questions were soaring.

Yet another reason is to actually place Aspose.Words.dll into an "installation" folder and make it visible in the Add Reference dialog box in Visual Studio. At some point in time we had just the assembly zipped available for download, but it looks like 90% of the users who downloaded it plunged it directly into the Bin folder of their projects and Visual Studio did not like it. Visual Studio presumes that the "original" dll is located somewhere else, not in the Bin folder and usually copies it into the Bin folder during build, usually overriding it. Since that was beyond most of the users we had a lot of complains too.

You don't need to run the installer on the deployment machine, you only nee to run on the development computer.

All registry keys created during install are part of the standard Windows Installer process. We did not intend to swarm your registry intentionally, so I'm not really sure how we could help in this case.

Actually, MSI Installer registers Aspose.Words component for COM interop, so that the library could be used from COM clients, for example from classical ASP. As a result all publicly available classes in the library get registered. That is absolutely normal. All COM DLLs are registered in that way. For example, MS Office creates hundreds of thousands of registry entries when installed, and that is not considered as particularly evil or obnoxious action. The registry in Windows can get corrupted. It can happen due to a number of different reasons but I can absolutely assure you that it does not have anything to do with Aspose.Words or its installer.

Ok, so all that makes perfect sense and I can understand why it is done that way.

THANKS