One more time Microsoft has proven that they just cannot do things right. This time it's all about the newly released Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005.
I'm certain that most of the developers working with Visual Studio 2005 know about the fact that the Service Pack has just been released. If not, at least they are aware of the fact that Microsoft was planning to release the product for some time now. So now it has been released. Are you ready to install it? Try! I have tried and it was not an easy task!
When first I have read that it is available I didn't think long before I went to the www.microsoft.com site. There I have used the search function in hope ... I don't even know what I had hoped for, given my previous experiences with searching Microsoft's site using Microsoft's search engine. The search results were disappointing yet not surprising - couldn't find it:
I have even tried to exclude the "beta" word, but with no better effect:
So, as usual, when I need to find something on Microsoft's site, I used Google (!!!). No surprise here, first result - a hit:
Having the page I went downloading. After starting the download I was presented with a funny page telling me that people who have downloaded Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 have also downloaded ... Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. What a coincidence 
After few hours of download (it has 450MB) I could finally run the setup and wait for few hours (or so according to the information on Microsoft's page) until it installs .
I had the setup procedure up and running and. Oh no! They have worked too long on this product to just let it install in like that! After a couple of minutes of waiting I've been presented with an error message Error 1718 some file did not pass the digital signature check:
What's going on? I'm sure most of us don't bother to read the installation procedure on the download page, especially as it is presented below download button, after clicking which you are redirected to another page, but there there is an information that such a problem may occur. Unfortunately, until you try installing SP1 on your concrete system, you don't know if you need to follow the procedure and by that time you have already lost a dozen of minutes. After pressing OK - the only available option, the Setup Procedure went through the same steps as before - i.e.: I had to agree to the same license terms etc. This time though it took more than ten times the amount of time just to inform me about the same problem once more!
After following the procedure I was finally able to install the service pack, after wasting a lot of time on it.
BTW: Since I haven't changed anything in my default Windows 2003 installation it seams to me that many people will have the same problem with the new Service Pack as I had!
If I count the time I have spent on trying to install the Service Pack and multiply this by the number of people that might have the problem I get a rather big number. Who is responsible? (Again! Last time it was because of IE7 that many people lost a lot of time because of the problems installing it and yet more (all) suffered from incredibly long installation time not to count few restarts and 2 validations during the process).
The question remains: why Microsoft, given all its resources, can't make it right the first time? (or second for that matter). Why they have to have everything so tightly integrated in to the operating system (like IE)? It is like if I had a house and my TV was integrated with it!
