A Painful Visual Studio .NET Install
Feb 1st, 2006 by Alex
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET takes forever to install. It copies a gazillion files to disk and and makes a utterly huge amount of registry additions. Needless to say the install discs could benefit from some re-vamping.
So the installer copies a gazillion files — meaning 18,098 files within 3,340 folders — to C:\Program Files\Visual Studio .NET. God-only-knows-how-many it copies to C:\WINNT\system32. Then it took nearly five full minutes to make registry additions, on a P4 3.4GHz w/ 2GB memory!
There were so many files that there were difficulties copying the contents of the discs to a network share, thus nixing my attempt at a network-based install. Due to to the insidious directory hierarchy, the filenames were too long to copy over. Swapping discs in the tray is a hassle, whether its on your workstation or the fileserver.
Why not compress the files on the disc, copy them, then decompress them as part of the install? Not that I have a great love of Sun, but at least they ship Solaris on a single DVD. I wish Microsoft would follow suit. Not that it would help the hour-long install, but it would beats 6-7 CDROMs.
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