Objecteering - Yeah, Right

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.