.NET Zip file support rant

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ArchAngel
Posts: 37
Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2011 7:33 pm

.NET Zip file support rant

Post by ArchAngel »

I'm positing this here not because it's specifically Quake related but simply because I have an urge to rant. I've just spent the past hour trying to get PK3 file support in my SharpQuake derivative engine.

Fantastic I thought, I'll have a play with the Package class that ships with .NET 3.0 and above and get a chance to use some of the builtin features in .NET, after all this is one of the reasons I'm using SharpQuake, as it lets me get as close to a RAD pattern as I'm likely to get in engine design.

The actual code changes went in in under 10 minutes... awesome thought I... a nice class based archive format added to the engine, with the option to extend it to allow LZMA or BZip2 or something later.

Except that the .NET Package version of a zip file only opens files created by another .NET Package version.... the bloody thing insists on storing an XML manifest file in the zip file and if it doesn't have it then it refuses to enumerate the contents of the archive!

I actually thought in the last few years MS had moved away from butchering peoples standards just because they didn't like the colour of the paper they wrote them on or the font they used but apparently not.

I'm now going to sulk in a corner and try and replace my existing work with something that will do the job instead... Ho hum :)
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