the horror of setting up a VS stack is only matched by that of trying to uninstall or update it.
Oprha Acai - In the mix of his discussion weight loss benefits were brought up. This essentially was the beginning of the oprha acai on Ophrah acai that got everyone excited for months to come.
The open source stack I’m using at the moment consists of Emacs.
Of course, just because it’s only one application doesn’t make it any quicker or easier to master but once you’ve got your head round it the mysteries of the universe are as nothing to you. Apparently. I’m a long way from mastering it so I wouldn’t know.
I think its funny that everyone basically attacked how many things you installed and the fact that, in their eyes, you don’t need all of these things. One user even thinks you would be better off just using the command line to develop everything. And VI is the best development environment ever!!!(This is from one of our Unix Trolls.)
I had this happen recently on a MS forum when I asked a question about configuring 802.1x. Instead of an answer or suggestions on how to solve the problem, I was provided with several “why would you care about that” type responses. “I didn’t do that”, etc. And while appreciate people taking time to respond, I actually want to know how to do something very specific, not hear why you don’t think it is necessary. Especially if you are not going to offer a better solution.
I do think that Paul’s comments are probably the most useful. MS is in a damned-if-do damned-if-don’t situation. If VS installs everything then people bitch about the wasted space and the long install. If it doesn’t install everything then people complain about soooo many things to install.
Me, I’m just happy to have such a wide range of choices and great tools to work with. Are MS tools perfect? No. But they sure do make a lot of things easier.
Aaron
I think Jeff was comparing against alternatives like SharpDevelop or Eclipse. Emacs and vi/vim are not useful comparisons, and catalyst is not an IDE.
VS2005 offers a whole lot more than any of those others (with the possible exception of Eclipse, I haven’t used it enough to be sure), but installation really is a huge pain. The service pack installation failed 3 times on one of my machines (after some 20 minutes of appearing to succeed), until I finally looked up the error message and found out that the only way to get around it was to change some obscure group policy setting, restart, install the service pack, then delete the GP setting and restart again. THANKS GUYS!
MS does have some CYA explanation of why installing VS2005 service packs and other add-ons is such an obscenely time-consuming process, but I think the issues actually run deeper than VS itself. I think the whole MSI system is broken, it’s just so unbelievably slow. All kinds of installations thrash the hard drive and CPU for several minutes when all they should need to do is extract a few files, maybe register a few COM DLLs. It’s pure inefficiency.
If Orcas and/or Vista solve this, great - but I’m not holding my breath.
Wow, when I read this, I am so glad I don’t work with Microsoft solutions. Don’t get me wrong, I used to work for MS back in the 80’s, and I been using VB since version 1.0 up until 6.0.
Today, my development stack consists of the following:
- Lotus Domino Designer (including the Notes client)
- Teamstudio Configurator, Snapper and Profiler.
- Ytria scanEz/actionbarEz/etc suite of programs.
- Martin-Scott Noteman suite of tools.
It takes me about 15 minutes to install all that, including entering license keys.
With Notes 8, Eclipse is a possible development environment for certain components, but at my dayjob, we will not get Notes 8 for a while, so today that is not an issue.
I agree with Aaron and Matt: vim vs. VS2005 isn’t a fair comparison. But I also know that the notion that “Linux is only free if your time is worthless” is true only if you’ve never used a decent package manager.
With Ubuntu (or it’s parent Debian) it’s extremely easy and fast to get a robust OSS stack up and running with APT. For example, you can build a typical web app stack (apache, php, mysql, subversion and eclipse) in about 10 minutes, download time included. Would I want to use it in a production environment? Not without a some fiddling, but it’s perfect for development purposes.
I haven’t messed with Red Hat in a while, but I suspect RPM could do OK with this too.
It’s kind of funny, actually, that I can build the development stack I use now (python 2.5, zope, postgres, svn, and eclipse) faster on a Debian box than I can in OS X or Windows. Our team is currently in the process of making that even faster by packaging our production environment and codebase in a single .deb package.
While it may be true that the installation process for VS 2005 is long, it is not necessarily complex: each of the items you listed is a double-click installer. That seems alot less difficult and time consuming than hunting down the right package for your distro, compiling from source if necessary, checking directory permissions, making sure you have all the dependencies installed, and dealing with a crashed KDE (okay that one was below the belt).
I’ve always tried to have .iso images of everything out on the file server and then use some customized script with msiexec /qb inside. the downside I have with this is that sometimes is doesnt install everything you need and sometimes you have to remount the instlal cd to pick up some things.
ideal? no. should this have been installed a long time ago by MS ? YES. if nothing else there should be a response file that Msiexec can look for to use to fill in/answer most of the prompts.
I don’t see the problem. This is a one time deal. How often are you formatting and reinstalling?
You should crate a hard drive image.