If only application installations were more like Java or Flash applets — low impact, with no permanent hooks into the host computer. Files that just sit in a directory, rather than installing themselves all over the filesystem, the registry, wherever-else.
Then maybe we wouldn’t be tempted to regularly rebuild operating systems, just to regain some of the lost performance, and removal of unused apps would be clean and painless.
Is it too much to ask?
Umm – Get a Mac?
(Insert pointless but accurate OS specific “windows is crap” rant here)
Phew – now I’ve got that off my chest I agree with you 100%.
Wasn’t .net meant to provide us with this (with the possible exception of registry entries)? I thought it was going to end “DLL Hell” and all sorts of wonderful things. Interesting that the first thing that happened is we engaged someone to build a .NET app and it didn’t work in three out of the four PC’s we first tried it on, and what answer did I get? “Try it on a clean machine” ummm I don’t think that’s the point!
Arrgghhh computers, who’d work with ’em?
> Interesting that the first thing that happened is we engaged someone to build a .NET app and it didn’t work in three out of the four PC’s we first tried
Perhaps that was a reflection on the quality of your application developers, not on .NET. We have a number of .NET applications successfully deployed to 1000s of PCs.
>> Files that just sit in a directory, rather than installing themselves all over the filesystem, the registry, wherever-else….Is it too much to ask?
Not too much to ask at all, that’s what Mac OSX has done for 7 years – drag and drop a single Application package, which contains all the resources that program needs within it, anywhere you want (but preferably into the Applications folder) and then just delete that file after. If you want to be really picky you could then go into your Library folder and delete the XML settings file for that application as well.