This is the source code to an amended version of the Vcredist_x86.exe distributed by Microsoft. Microsoft forgot to include the required Windows Installer 3.1 in the redistributable. The above file comes with a bootstrapper that detects if any prerequisites are not missing and installs the required runtimes. ...

The Microsoft Platform SDK does an excellent job of documenting the topics of isolated applications and side-by-side assemblies. However, not everyone equates this topic with that of registration-free activation of COM components. Registration-free COM is a platform feature of great interest to enterprises with locked-down servers and applications isolated on shared infrastructures. This article walks through a working example of the registration-free activation of a native COM component by native clients and, via COM interop, by a managed client. (18 printed pages)

Fortunately, those of us in PAL-land don't have to worry about such things :-), but for historical technical reasons NTSC broadcasts 29.97 frames per second. If you round this to 30 and number your frames accordingly then timecode will no longer correspond to elapsed time, so to correct this drop frame timecode skips over certain frame numbers. The frames themselves aren't dropped, just the numbers. To understand what's going on better it might help to think it terms of simpler numbers. Imagine a system using 9.5 frames a second, say. You might label frames by counting 10 frames one second and 9 the next. You haven't lost a frame, just skipped one number every 2 seconds in your counting sequence to keep things in step. Drop frame timecode is the same, except it skips 2 frame numbers a minute, 9 minutes out of 10 ((10 minutes - 2*9) / 10 minutes = 17982/18000 = 29.97).