I’ve not done any major development work specifically inside MS Windows for a few years now, and I’ve forgotten what some of the hassles are. Today I revisited that world, looking to play with the new ASP.NET and .NET 3.5 framework. Whew what a hassle. Let me start by saying I can only run Windows XP (home I think) in a VMWare environment under Linux. My XP partition on my laptop just quit working in Oct 2006, after about 6 months of use. When I boot up I get a screen telling me I need to reinstall from the source disks. Given that this was a laptop, all you get is a disk which reformats your drive, or at least that’s how it looks. I already had a linux partition on there with real data, so I quit using the XP partition altogether.
Yes, I ‘pirated’ a version of XP for my VMWare player – I feel morally justified in doing so because the XP I paid for broke itself after 6 months of use, but technically I’ve broken some copyright law somewhere.
Given the disk space issue, I only have a 6 gig drive on the XP image, which doesn’t get you much these days. I had Visual Studio Express 2005 (both C# and VB editions), and tried to remove one to make room for VS Web Express 2008. No dice – it tried to uninstall for about 20 minutes, and the progress bar quit moving, so I had to kill that process, and then I couldn’t re-uninstall cause it had removed the uninstall program already (or couldn’t find it) so I was left with half an installation. I had enough disk space at that time for VBWeb2008, but it was still annoying.
So I started installing, and the installer just quit moving part way through. Again, waiting 15 minutes and *no* progress movement on installing VSWebExpress2008 – what’s up with that? So I cancelled, and tried to remove the .net 2.0 library (cause the VSWeb will install .net 3.5 anyway). The .net uninstaller wouldn’t uninstall. Maybe I just need to leave it overnight and see if it uninstalls? I know virtualized machines are slower, but this is just insanity – it’s not really working, but there’s no way (I know of anyway) to get past these issues.
I’d love to try the latest .NET 3.5 stuff, but apparently I’m not cutting edge enough? Sorry for sounding paranoid, but might this be an issue with running under VMWare? I have no other choice right now, and I’m not going to get another machine this week just to play with stuff, but does anyone else have these problems?
Linux has its issues, no doubt. I have problems all day long, but few that ever involve the installation of software just hanging, or software removal hanging. Java apps on Linux are certainly no walk in the park, with path issues, various minor bugs here and there and whatnot, but at least I can get things like eclipse and netbeans *installed*. FWIW, I didn’t have as many problems on my ‘corporate’ PC back in 2007, but I still had some, they just weren’t as fatal as these have been (so far).
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Just happened again with removing Visual C# 2005 Express.
> So I started installing, and the installer just quit moving part way through. Again, waiting 15 minutes and *no* progress movement on installing VSWebExpress2008 – what’s up with that?
Installing the full VS2008 takes at least 3 hours with often a complete lack of feedback. I wouldn’t be surprised that removing the old version be similar.
Thanks Dan. I guess if that’s the case, some sort of timer explaining that this process could take an hour or more would be in order.
Don’t waste your time trying to install stuff in VMWare. Just take advantage of all of the virtual labs available for the platform. All it requires is IE6, javascript, and you install an activex control.
So launch VMWare, open IE browser and go here to start playing:
http://tinyurl.com/3aswld
Hope that helps.
ps – Dan is right you should have been more patient, it takes a long time to install + you are using vmware + you are using a laptop + you are Mike so you knew going in it wasn’t going to work for you (it is just nature’s law being that you are Mike)
True, but having the same progress bar which doesn’t move for 20-30 minutes isn’t a good experience. Something like “this may take 2 hours” would be useful to know. Now I have a hosed up image. I might be able to restore from an earlier one.