Nynaeve

Yesterday, I decided to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on two of my systems that I do major development work on. This turned out to be a painful mess that ate several hours of my time that day. If you ever decide to install VS 2005 SP1, plan to have an hour or two of time to waste ahead of you… (at least in my case, I learned from my mistakes of expecting a reasonable setup user experience the first time around and was better prepared for the second system that I had to install SP1 on).

Specifically, I ran into several different issues during setup. First of all, it was slow, and by slow, I mean slow. It took something on the order of 15-20 minutes just to get through the Windows Installer initialization dialog, during this time it was pegging CPU and I/O for my box, thus making it fairly unusable. The computer that I was installing VS 2005 SP1 on may not be the latest and greatest, but I should hope that it should be possible for one to design a setup package that won’t totally destroy the performance of a 1.5-year-old top-of-the-line laptop for 15 minutes during setup initialization. (It’s worth noting that the original installer for VS 2005 didn’t have this problem, nor did the installer for the Vista Platform SDK, the Vista WDK, Office 2007, or any of the other programs I’ve ever installed on my box.)

As if making my system unusable for 15 minutes wasn’t bad enough, there is a nice little confirmation dialog box that asks if you really want to install VS 2005 SP1 which occurs after you just had to spend 15+ minutes staring at a dialog that doesn’t update with progress information in any meaningful fashion. (Or more likely, after you have given up waiting and went to do something else while setup finished doing its thing. This is particularly frustrating, since given a setup program that is just sitting there grinding away without any UI feedback, as an end user you are very likely to just go read a book, strike up a conversation, or do something else besides just stare at your screen for minutes on end with nothing visibly happening. It would be okay if setup prompted you to continue before it decided to just waste 15+ minutes of your time. As it stands, resist the temptation to leave your computer completely unattended, or you’ll just come back to a dialog box that was preventing the bulk of setup from completing, meaning you’ll have even more wasted time waiting for setup to finish ahead of you.)

By this point, I was already thinking that this setup experience was downright terrible, but the worst was yet to come in this setup story of sorrow. It turns out that setup (undocumentedly) likes to use ~2.5GB or so on your system partition (even if all of your Visual Studio / Platform SDK products are installed on a different partition). Unfortunately, nobody bothered to mention this anywhere in the release notes at the time when I started my installation, and setup doesn’t even bother to check for the amount of free space ahead of time. To make matters even worse, you are most likely to run into this problem after the 15+ minute initialization period, which makes it all the more painful if it causes your setup instance to completely fail, as described below. It turns out that if setup runs out of space at a particular moment in time, you may get stuck at a abort/retry dialog asking you to free more space. However, in at least one instance of running out of space (which I hit several times in the course of trying to free up enough space on the partition that setup shouldn’t have even been touching), setup gets broken and will just refuse to continue to copy files. If you click “retry”, you’ll simply get the same out of space dialog again (regardless of whether you have actually freed up the necessary space), and your only option from that point forward is to cancel setup (which takes another 10 minutes to finish rolling back) and restart it (which will, again, involve at least 15+ minutes of waiting before a confirmation dialog). It should be noted that the second time setup failed due to out of space, it did properly recover after I told it to retry, so it seems that only certain parts of setup get into this non-recoverable state where an out of space error is really fatal.

After repeatedly hitting the out of space error, I was rather interested to find out just why setup needed 2.5GB of space on my system partition despite the fact that VS 2005 was installed on a different partition. It turns out that most of the space requirement comes from the fact that the ~450MB installer makes no less than three copies of itself in your %TEMP% directory during setup (look for 450MB .msp files in %TEMP% while it’s running), even if the original .msi was present on a local hard drive and not a removable storage medium. Furthermore, setup will then need to make a fourth copy of the .msi in your %SystemRoot%\Installer directory for permanent storage in case you need to make modifications to your VS 2005 SP1 install without having the original .msi present. Now, I am certainly no expert in MSI-based installers, but it seems to me that making four copies of a 450MB installer file in your system partition is just ever so slightly excessive…

There are certainly some cool features and bug fixes (especially relating to PGO) in VS 2005 SP1, such as an ASLR-aware linker that make it a compelling upgrade, but I give the setup experience a failing grade. It’s by far the worst that I have ever seen out of any shipping Microsoft product to date.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.