OJ’s rants What would OJ do?

Damn you, Crystal Reports!

I've had Visual Studio 2008 installed for quite a while. When I first installed it I decided not to install the Crystal Reports components because I was fairly certain that I'd never need them at home.

Well, the worm has turned! On my new gig, I have the joy of working from home. It just so happens that I also need to use Crystal Reports. How silly of me to not bother installing a few extra components the first time so I didn't have to go through the pain of going through another VS Setup.

On the surface this doesn't sound like a painful experience right? WRONG. It's a lot more painful than you think.

I fired up the Programs and Features section of Vista's control panel to fire up the add/remove components section of the install.

Despite choosing just one extra component in the options list, it decided to attempt install of other components too. Observe

Visual Studio 2008 again? SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Design Tools!? SQL Server Compact 3.5 for Devices?! Shared Management Objects?! WHAT THE F**K?! I didn't ask for any of that crap. It's not as if looking at Mr Tiny Face wasn't bad enough. Now I get to put up with a bunch of other shit that I don't want or need?

I was hoping that it was going to have enough "stuff" on the HDD to update without me needing to get the VS ISO I was wrong. I had to search for the ISO that I downloaded from MSDN. This wasn't too much of an issue, but was still painful as I had to copy it onto my local machine from my Terastation -- all 3.4GB of it.

It then proceeds past the unnecessary installs until it gets to Shared Management Objects at which point I get another epic fail.

The bloody thing wasn't on the disc! So I grab it off the web, point the installer at the download location and it tells me that the path is invalid.

I was starting to get rather narked at this point. I hit cancel at which point I was greeted with a message telling me that: The operation in progress cannot be cancelled.

Then the cancel succeeded! Make up your mind! The final screen implied install fails of epic proportions, but only turned out to be that the Shared Management Objects didn't install.
I won't be crying about that given that I didn't want it in the first place! If I find that I do need it down the track I can install it manually. After all, I did download it myself anyway.

The next question I have is: What level of pain will I feel if I don't reinstall VS 2008 SP1 before I attempt to do any development? I'm too scared to find out the answer. Now I get to wait for another decade for the service pack install to finish.

Yet another win for the Microsoft Installation process.