January 25, 2003

Visual Studio, Visual Idiocy

Have an old copy of Visual Studio 6.0 lying around? I do, as I was given a copy in college. Thanks for the junk, Microsoft. The following are the messages that will greet you if perform an installation of VS6, and then tell it not to reboot at the end of the installation.

"You have chosen to end Setup without restarting Windows. You must restart Windows to complete the installation of this software."

The only option on this dialog is an OK button. That's the first one. If Windows has to be rebooted, why even offer the option of not rebooting?

"Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise Setup was not completed successfully."

Again, only an OK button. So, if you don't reboot, it says that it wasn't successfully installed. However, if you reboot, it runs fine. Minus another point, MS.

"The system must be restarted in order for the Installation Wizard to proceed. The system will now restart."

What have we here? Yet another OK button! This might be my favorite of the three, for it's sheer idiocy. Three dialogs, each more idiotic than the previous one, simply because I opted not to reboot. They could have saved a lot of time and effort if they just forced a reboot, rather than programming in the options and dialogs.

It's this type of stuff that makes me bang my head on my desk.

Posted by Mike at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)