It doesn’t seem to matter how often we hear or read about what we should do. We still don’t do it. I even tell my clients what they should do, but I don’t do it. And today it bit me on the bum.

12th April was a significant day for Microsoft developers. Visual Studio 2010 was launched. It was 13th April here in Australia, because we are so far ahead of most of the rest of the world, except for New Zealand, and that is a real worry. But I digress.

Yesterday morning I downloaded Visual Studio. Actually I started the download and then went to see a client and didn’t get back until late afternoon. And then I had to install it.

I couldn’t install it straight away because I had the RC version already installed. And I had enormous trouble getting it uninstalled. Eventually, after many hours, it was gone. Or so I thought. I then tried to install VS 2010 and it told me that it couldn’t install because I still had a component left on. I uninstalled it and tried again. It started out fine but got to installing the .Net Framework V4 and there it hanged, hung, I’m not sure which.

I rebooted and tried again. Same thing. I got a cup of coffee and tried again. Still no go.

I downloaded the framework separately and tried that. It wouldn’t budge. I got another cup of coffee and played a few games of Sudoku, and that didn’t help.

At this stage I thought that it might be time for a clean install on the pc, and even though that thought fills me with dread, it probably is time, soon. I thought that I had better check my backup files and make sure that I have everything that I need. My client apps aren’t a problem, they are all under version control on a separate machine. But I have other backups sitting on two 1 tb external disks. Only one was connected to the pc at the time and the other one has some useful stuff on it. It hasn’t been connected since I re-arranged my office some time ago. So it was now time to dig it out and crawl around the floor under the desk and plug it in.

I tried one more time to install Visual Studio, and what do you know, it is working. It is chugging along quite nicely as I write. But it is now 12:20 am and I have been at this for hours.

The moral is, if I hadn’t installed the RC version I probably wouldn’t have had these problems. I wanted to try it out and so I installed it. I didn’t use it for any production work, I’m not that stupid. But I do have VMWare installed on this machine. And I have a couple of virtual machines set up for this purpose. Why didn’t I install the RC version on a vm? Cause I am dumb. Lazy and dumb.

But I have another confession to make. Before I got the RC version, I had a copy of a beta version. I didn’t install that on a vm either.

I said that I am not only dumb, I am lazy. If I was smart and lazy I would have stuck both these versions on a vm. It is a lot quicker to delete a virtual machine and then make a new clone of a clean vm and install the beta and release candidate versions on the new vm.

I have learnt my lesson, this has been a nightmare.

At least it is going well now and tomorrow I can play with it.