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Saturday, February 24, 2007
lots of computers
Right now, I'm running a full backup of my desktop PC to my new 500 GB external drive. I'm also working on wiping my old Gateway and reinstalling Windows XP on it, so I can hand it off to a friend who has some use for it. And I'm also installing various things on my new Vista laptop. So I'm jumping around from machine to machine, checking on stuff, pressing "OK" a lot, and stuff like that.
On the Vista laptop, I've spent several hours trying to get Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express set up. Everything seems to be working now, but it sure takes a long time to get that all set up. First, you have to install the original VS 2005 package from DVD. That takes a while. Then, you have to install SP 1. That can take quite a while: several hours. There's a good explanation for this lengthy install here, and apparently Vista adds even more of a complication to this, so it takes even longer under Vista vs. XP.
After SP1, you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I'm a little alarmed that this is still a beta; you'd think that one of Microsoft's first priorities would be getting a good solid development environment running on Vista.
And, if you want to bring SQL Express up to date, you need to install SQL 2005 Service Pack 2. I'm not 100% if I had to do both of these, but I installed "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services" and "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit". Then, I went back and installed the latest Books Online files.
So, all that took about four hours. Call me crazy, but that really seems like too long just to set up your development environment. Back in the old days, it'd take maybe 5 minutes to install, say, Clipper 5.2 or Turbo Pascal. I guess this is progress, but it doesn't feel like it!
On the Vista laptop, I've spent several hours trying to get Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express set up. Everything seems to be working now, but it sure takes a long time to get that all set up. First, you have to install the original VS 2005 package from DVD. That takes a while. Then, you have to install SP 1. That can take quite a while: several hours. There's a good explanation for this lengthy install here, and apparently Vista adds even more of a complication to this, so it takes even longer under Vista vs. XP.
After SP1, you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I'm a little alarmed that this is still a beta; you'd think that one of Microsoft's first priorities would be getting a good solid development environment running on Vista.
And, if you want to bring SQL Express up to date, you need to install SQL 2005 Service Pack 2. I'm not 100% if I had to do both of these, but I installed "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services" and "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit". Then, I went back and installed the latest Books Online files.
So, all that took about four hours. Call me crazy, but that really seems like too long just to set up your development environment. Back in the old days, it'd take maybe 5 minutes to install, say, Clipper 5.2 or Turbo Pascal. I guess this is progress, but it doesn't feel like it!
Labels: hardware, programming, Windows
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