A quick reminder on testing Windows desktop application installers: make sure they work with redirected folders

If you are selling your software to corporate customers, you might run into a situation where your customer (the target machine of installation) uses redirected folders. Redirected folders are an old and useful Windows feature, but unless you haven't used them yourself, chances are you haven't heard about them.

Now, if you are designing installer applications, make sure you test your application with a domain user that has redirected his/her folders to a network drive or share. Surprisingly many common applications fail this text, for instance Adobe's Acrobat installer, which I recently used to do some simple graphics work.

If your application absolutely requires local folder paths, at least provide a useful error message to the user, instead of just an error code, "Setup interrupted" like Adobe does. Bad engineering, but this wasn't the first time…

Sidenote: Personally, I'm using redirected folders in my development environment, as they help my get access to my files no matter which PC I'm currently working on. For instance, the Documents links point to always the same files, instead of a set of local files, different on each machine.

Happy hacking!