Trying out Chrome – sort of

We are currently waiting for the releases of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0, so that we can do the final testing before publishing SmartInspect 1.2. Having a bit of free time now, I thought it would be a good idea to try out Chrome, an Object Pascal language for .NET. I like Pascal’s syntax and Chrome seems to have a bunch of cool language features. I’ve planned to try it for some quite now but never came to it.

When visiting the website of Chrome and going to the download area, I was surprised to see that no registration was required to download the trial. That’s a big plus for me, since I don’t like to register, leaving my name and email just for trying out a piece of software. I downloaded the trial and started the installation. It went smooth with Chrome fully integrated into Visual Studio. I launched Visual Studio, eagerly waiting to start my first project with Chrome when I suddenly faced a Chrome registration wizard. Well, as said, I don’t like registrations, but the expectations of finally trying out Chrome ruled out my dislikes. I tried to register.

At first, the registration process wanted me to click on a link in the wizard to download a so called confirmation code. I clicked on it, entered my name and email address on the Chrome website and a few minutes later I got the code via mail. Having the code on hand, I thought I could finally try out Chrome. Turned out that I was wrong. Totally wrong. Instead of finally getting access to Chrome, the confirmation code only enabled me to download a trial license file.

After putting so much effort into seeing Chrome in action, I thought “well, do it, just download another file and you’re done”. So I clicked on the link. But instead of pointing me to the Chrome website as previously when clicking on the link for the confirmation code, the wizard kept silent at first and then displayed an error a few seconds later saying that the “operation can not be completed”. The wizard tried to make a direct connection to the RemObjects website. Unfortunately, this does not work on our developer machines. For security reasons, we don’t allow direct internet access, only for a few services such as nntp or nntps. For web things we use an http proxy server with authentication.

So, I entered my proxy information in the Internet Explorer settings (I normally use Firefox) and hoped for the best. Well, the result can be seen in the screenshot above. The registration wizard used the proxy now, but it seems that no one ever tested it with authentication. The only option I’d left was to start Internet Explorer again, visit a random website to enter my login/password for the proxy, let Internet Explorer remember these values and then download the trial license file via the registration wizard.

Well, to put it short, this didn’t work either. It seems that the registration wizard or the API it uses to download files doesn’t know anything about the login/password combination. Strange. I abstained from looking in the proxy log or sniffing the intranet traffic just for finding out the url to download the trial license file.