The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Continuing Visual Studio Saga: Jeers and Cheers

Continuing Visual Studio Saga: Jeers and Cheers

The problem: Make Visual Studio run on my shiny new laptop. The story to date: Days of nasty work, reinstalling, trouble-shooting, etc.

The current theory: Disc 3 of the installation media is marginal, and won't work in many CD drives. The current goal: Replace disc 3 of Visual Studio. This will take longer than it should for various stupid administrative reasons.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the current heros and villans in this saga:

Jeers to my laptop vendor's tech support. They're very nice and helpful, but utterly clueless, even on such basic issues as "How do I install a clean copy of XP Pro on this stupid machine?"

Cheers to whoever designed the hardware in the laptop. It's gorgeously fast. It installs Visual Studio faster than any laptop I've ever seen. :-)

Jeers to the MSDN subscription people. It's a logistical pain in the neck to deal with them. Similar jeers to whomever allowed our MSDN subscription to lapse this year.

MAJOR CHEERS to the Visual Studio installation support team. They're massively helpful and utterly determined to make Visual Studio work. Somebody in management has obviously decided that being unable to install Microsoft dev tools is simply unacceptable, and that the problem will be fixed.

J. Random Hacker
Friday, May 14, 2004

I downloaded my CD image[s] from http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/default.asp

Christopher Wells
Friday, May 14, 2004

That only works if management remembered to renew your MSDN subscription this year. :-/

Fortunately, the amazingly wonderful Visual Studio support folks are gonna get me up and running. They all heroes, I tell ya, and they all deserve shiny medals.

(You see, Philo, I'm really not that grumpy a person, provided I've got a working compiler.)

J. Random Hacker
Friday, May 14, 2004