I found myself working on another inherited application this week. As it with all inherited applications, especially ones as old as this one, the processes around deployment were a mess. In fact, most deployments had been done by hand with no standards around the deployment location. How was I supposed to write an upgrade for an application when I didn’t even know where it was installed?

At least the ActiveX DLL’s details were in the registry – retrieving them was a pretty simple two step process; you just need to know the name of one of the classes within your DLL.