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2007-02-11

Dear Microsoft: No Thanks for the Updates

This morning, I declined to accept the “High Priority” update that Microsoft Update wanted to download and install for me: Visual Studio 2005 SP1.  I already knew this update was available, and I have been waiting for the smoke to clear on how well it handles the Express Editions, especially the Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. 

{tags: orcmid Microsoft Update Visual Studio VC++ 2005 Express software engineering}

There are enough reports of instabilities and screw-ups around redistributables and other integration edge cases that I want to wait.  In truth, I would wait in any case.  I am in the middle of a project and all of my development tools are working just fine thank-you-very-much.  I am not about to risk destabilization of anything until the project is at a point where I everything is delivered, buttoned down, and I have an easy fall-back mitigation in place.  That means no installing hot graphics adapters, new sound fixtures, or upgrading to Vista on my main development machine.

What I will do is obtain the download/installable version, not the one that Microsoft Update installs automatically, and keep it around until I am ready to use it.  Since it must be run once for each VS 2005 flavor that is installed, including each separate Express Edition on each machine, I want one I can keep, backup, move around, and re-rerun if I do any re-installs in the future.  Hmm, it is interesting that the SP1 does not appear to be in my MSDN distribution for January 2007.  I think I’ll just wait for the little treasure to show up in my postal mailbox, no downloading required.

Some place around my project’s 0.90 beta (I’m building 0.60beta right now) and the hardening of my project and its regression tests, I will use variations of VC++ 2005, Platform SDKs, and Java SDKs so that I can verify that the source code, scripts, and builds all on the latest-available tool bases as well as the ones I started with.  After that I can give myself leave to make other interesting upgrades to my systems.

Oh oh, I did download some non-priority upgrades, including .NET 3.0 and new root certificates.  I will know shortly whether that was prudent or not.

[update 2007-02-10T20:37Z: added tags and a cross-reference on security.]

posted by orcmid at 2/10/2007 09:34:00 AM, rating data by NewsGator Online