Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Its 2006 and MS has still learned nothing about installations!?

Due to a contractor job, I need to get some Visual C#/.NET/MSSQL experience. So I was going to install Visual C# Express (or as it is called Visual Studio 8, or other). I got the 3 mb installation file and started the installation (I hoped). The installation program did what they always do, Greetings&Saluations, Accept eula, Install MSDN and MSSQL?. Sure I could go for those as well. The program told me that I needed 1.7++ GBs of hard drive for this installation. Fine, I have plenty of space on my D-drive (data&Programs), which I told the program.

But wait a minute! That isnt how Ms wants it!

If I choose to install everything onto the d-drive, it would install 60 MBs on the D-drive and a whooping 1.7 GBs on the C-drive. But I thought I told VS to install on the d-drive and not onto the c-drive. Of course, I understand that VS requires some files to be installed on the c-drive. But 1.7 GBs, that is ridiculos.

Ok, regroup. Lets just choose the VSC# package, and I still want to install on the d-drive. Now it still wants to install 60 MBs on the d-drive and only 314 MBs on the c-drive.

When I left the MS development environment for six years ago, they still had this idea that I as a user shouldnt be allowed to make decisions like this. Still, they order me around and forces me to install everything on the c-drive. (The c-drive is already packed as every other program/driver wants to install onto the c-drive). I guess I can solve this the MS-user way, do a re-install every two years.

At least with Java, I'm old enough to choose where to put things.