Installer woes

I have been working like a madman for the past few days trying to clean up some installation problems that have crept up on some old releases that are still being distributed to Appian's update client list...

One of the components of the installer has a US and a Canada version that seem to be working separately, but when we combine them to run as one process using all of the data for both versions, it starts getting a little foggy and the service isn't starting anymore for some reason.

For a while I was using some nonstandard/funky end of line characters that Windows' notepad didn't particularly care for. (square boxes instead of text resuming on the next line, but wordpad opens it up just fine... go figure) Anyways so I figured out that in NSIS I need to put in
$/r$/n
for an end of line, instead of what i've been using in c# (just the classic /n).

So I thought all was well, but now I'm finding that I didn't update all of my code like I thought I had. So I've been going through each installer to make sure that I've got everything updated with the correct end of line character...

Some of my tests have also turned up that not all of the required data for the US is installing correctly. There are a number of files that do not exist on the target machine after my installer completes.

So if I never have to reverse engineer someone else's installer just to streamline our own installation process I will be a very happy man. It pays the bills, but boy is it ever so tedious, meticulous, and error prone.