Well, it looks like I'm ditching a couple of weeks' worth of work integrating Enterprise Instrumentation Framework into our distributed app. Although it's painful to do this, I always operate on the principle of "you gotta trust your tools to work" and I do not trust EIF now.
You see, during development, everything looked all nice & shiny. We installed the EIF package on the developers' machines and used InstallUtil to wire up the app's assemblies. However, when we got to deployment, the picture darkened. First, there is not a merge module to deploy the runtime. This is bad; c'mon, even *I* write MSMs. Second, you can't just include the package Microsoft does provide with your Windows Installer package; it tries to install the trace logging service and throws an error when it can't start it, causing the entire installation to fail. Thirdly (and the straw that broke the camel's back), you can't use their ProjectInstaller class in an MSI - it ONLY works with InstallUtil. Deployment was obviously neglected with this tool, and that is unacceptable.
Yes, I know ALL software has bugs (even mine!). But the fact of the matter is that this is a glaring, nasty, should-have-been-caught-in-the-cradle type of bug. Who didn't think to try the damn thing in an installation package? If something as fundamental as this fails, how can I reasonably believe nothing else slipped through the cracks?
Yes, I know there are workarounds. Yes, we could require InstallUtil to be run manually. Yes, we could manually register the junk that EIF's installer is supposed to. Mike Hayton of MS even posted an interesting idea to the microsoft.public.vsnet.enterprisetools newsgroup. But all of these are a kludge to install a tool that I'm already suspicious of. I hold Microsoft's stuff to a higher standard - only the most crucial, gotta-have-the-functionality features merit workarounds, and only when it's something really esoteric that I've stumbled across in low-level hacking.
*Sigh* I'm sure my poor attitude is going to hurt my chances at realizing my dream of working for Microsoft...
[Updated 4/12/2004: I have retracted a little of this rant here.]