Santosh Benjamin

VS 2005 DVDs - Of Scarcity and Abundance

I will never understand MS and their ideas on software distribution. I have an MSDN Universal Subscription which usually means that you get all the goodies on DVD regularly. For a while i was content to download stuff occasionally and only when VS 2005 came out did i decide to change my media pack to DVD hoping to get my hands on Whidbey. Unfortunately, Yukon beta 2 was available but no sign of Whidbey. So i steeled myself and setup a download process on a spare workstation. The wretched thing took 3 or 4 days to complete and kept getting interrupted. Thankfully one of my colleagues helped me out by restarting it whenever he saw it had failed cos I was away on the BTS training course. It was a grand total of 3.75 Gigs. DOnt know what happened to our network either. When i downloaded a 76MB Office 2003 SP recently it took just a few seconds early in the morning for all 76 MB, but this proceeeded at 21 KB per second or something (for VS).

Anyway, heres the irony. I then went on Saturday for the DeveloperDeveloper event in Reading and what do I find but hundreds of DVDs kicking about.(By this time I had also ordered the DVD while waiting for the download to complete). So i happily helped myself to it.

This is what I dont understand, if Yukon beta can be distributed on MSDN and VS 2005 so freely at an event, why not send the VS 2005 DVD as part of MSDN ? I guess part of the reason maybe that we now have a MSDN Premium Subscription to consume VS 2005 and hence with a Universal subscription you dont get it (but I do recall reading about getting upgraded easily to Premium). Anyway, it doesnt matter now, but MS could have saved us a whole load of grief.

To make things worse, an acquaintance just emailed me to let me know that in his office the workstations do not recognise the DVD set given out at the Developer event !! :-( . Bah! humbug! so much for free DVDs. Let me see what happens on my workstation.