lessmsi
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activescott
Portable version?
Isn't default release already portable
To be clear, when we're talking about portability, we're not just talking about "can it run from a USB drive"? We're talking about whatever settings you change, they stay with the program, regardless of the medium it's launched from (USB, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.) Re-running a process or re-changing a setting on each computer is not portable.
To that end:
- Command-line tools are very rarely anything BUT portable so I'm confident the answer is yes for lessmsi.exe in the command prompt.
- The program lessmsi-gui.exe writes some data to C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\LessMsi , but this is exclusively for the recent file list. Otherwise, the program itself appears to save no settings. For this, I'd say it's mostly portable.
- The Windows Explorer integration feature by it's very nature isn't portable. Registry entries don't transfer from computer to computer. You would have to run this process every time you launched the program.
Ultimately I'd call this portable, though it's dependency on dotNET 4.0 means that it's functionality on older computers (like WinXP) isn't a sure thing.
XP has NET 4.0
Many do have dotNET 4.0, but not by default. As a result, only some XP machines you'll come across will have the latest version installed. Then, if you're on a slow network connection, it can be difficult to download (~50 megs) and if you're using a public computer, you probably don't have admin rights to add it. It's also possible that updated dotNET tools and capabilities may not work for XP, whose version of dotNET is not being managed by Microsoft (to my knowledge).
Additionally, should the developer decide to start using dotNET 4.5, that won't run on WinXP.
PortableApps.com for example won't even consider programs with dotNET dependencies but ultimately it comes down to fewer dependencies mean greater portability.
[Edit: better wording, added note about PortableApps and dotNET 4.5]
RE: Portable
I think it's reasonably portable and it seems others agree. Happy to consider pull requests to save recent file list somewhere else, but IMHO not important.
WinXP / .NET 4.0 / .NET 4.5 Frankly, I don't have WinXP readily available to test with, but I make an effort to stay on the oldest (i.e. most compatible) version of .NET that I can. Everything that is distributed is still on .NET 4.0 (although unit testing is now on .NET 4.5 and I forget why, but there was a tool that compelled me to do so). I have no intention of upgrading the distributed code beyond .NET 4.0, but it is good to know that people actually value those 6+ year old versions of .NET!
