I’m looking for a good UML design tool to use on some larger projects. Objecteering looked like a good prospect to evaluate. Big Mistake.

Objecteering comes with a personal edition, for non-commercial use. I though that this would be a good place to start the evaluation - intending to request a formal evaluation license if the personal edition looked worthwhile.

I started by installing the product.

In retrospect, this was my mistake.

While Objecteering DID appear to install, it completely screwed up many of the other settings on my machine, including:

  • Removing the %SYSTEMROOT%\System32 from my Path (breaking commonly used commands like SUBST);
  • Delphi 5 was completely inoperable (unable to start because key DLLs could not be found);
  • Java was equally broken (my CLASSPATH had been completely removed);
  • OpenOffice was also broken (for reasons I didn’t get into diagnosing).

In my mind, the cardinal rule of application development has to be “Respect the users data” - in other words, do everything you can to make sure you don’t lose the any of the users work.

The Objecteering installer broke that rule - and as a consequence, I’ll not be evaluating the tool any further.

It does not matter how good (or not) Objecteering actually is - since I can’t trust the installer to leave my machine in working condition, I’m not about to trust the application itself with my designs.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, after around 4 hours of finding (and fixing one problem after the other), I ended up using the Windows XP rollback feature to reset the machine back to how it was immediately before the Objecteering install. Everything works now.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus
Next Post
Self Improvement  23 Jun 2004
Prior Post
Improving the Taskbar  29 Apr 2004
Related Posts
Using Constructors  27 Feb 2023
An Inconvenient API  18 Feb 2023
Method Archetypes  11 Sep 2022
A bash puzzle, solved  02 Jul 2022
A bash puzzle  25 Jun 2022
Improve your troubleshooting by aggregating errors  11 Jun 2022
Improve your troubleshooting by wrapping errors  28 May 2022
Keep your promises  14 May 2022
When are you done?  18 Apr 2022
Fixing GitHub Authentication  28 Nov 2021
Archives
June 2004
2004