Speaking of unexpected happenings, I got contacted a couple of days ago by someone asking me if the Visual Basic 6 Runtimes Pack was free for enterprise use (spoiler: it is).

The pack doesn't require me having to recompile anything using the Visual Basic 6 IDE, as I haven't had that thing installed in well over a decade, so I thought I'd repackage it in an updated installer.

Running the original VB Pack installer itself shows that it was littered with errors. Not errors in the files it was installing (well, maybe a couple - but more on that later), but in the instructions and license.

As with all of my software installers, there are three text documents the installer shows to the user.

There's the License that is shown at the very start which contains the licensing terms that must be agreed to before the installer will do its thing.

Second is the Before, which contains general information. In this case, it outlines what the pack is and what it'll install. Also included is the pack version and its release date, just like the other two docs.

Thirdly, and lastly, is the After. This is just a quick message letting the user know that everything is installed.

The problems are down to the site each document points to: they're wrong. As this pack was originally released way back in 2002, the URLs are pointing to my old site www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk as opposed to here.

Another problem is the release date. Each of the three documents mentioned above have entirely different dates! No idea how that happened.

Oh, the file errors that I alluded to above. There was a note in the Before text saying that any .dll registration errors that occur can safely be ignored. While setting other properties within the installer, I noticed there was a flag for ignoring any errors that are thrown during the regsvr process. Now that flag is enabled so the errors are no longer shown, if they indeed occur at all this time around.

As well as general quality control, I wanted to get this site properly advertised in there as there is a huge amount of downloads of that pack. It seems people and companies just tell their customers to download the installer from my site. I might as well get a little bit of advertisement from it as it's not exactly like I'm gaining anything.