I finally bought myself a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I’ve been very excited to get the updated version (I was running Visual Studio 2003) becuse it’s chock full of great new features. In particular I am excited to try out the auto-update that is built in as well as the refactoring features.
Alas, my install will have to wait, as I just received the error message, “You must install Microsoft Office 2003 in order to proceed.” Huh? The development environment is now dependent on Office being installed? Ack! I guess most folks installing VS2005 have a universal subscription, so this isn’t an issue. And it does tell you this on the box, but I still didn’t expect it and was too dumb to read. You know, I really do like Microsoft software… That is why I was so excited to install. But these interdependencies sometimes just don’t make sense. When it works, it works great. But it sure would be a lot better if it were lean-and-mean too.
I’ve been perfectly happy without Office on my system for the last two years using OpenOffice. I never upgraded to the latest versions of OpenOffice, and from what I hear, it’s improved quite a lot. And, I’m still grumpy about not having a free version of Office available for home users.
Oh well, I’ll get over it. I’ll go buy Office 2003 now because I want my VS2005 that badly. More to come!
Update:
I managed to get Office 2003 installed, but VS2005 still refuses to run unless I have Office 2003 SP1. However, repeated installations of SP1 fail with the ever-so-helpful error code “0x51f”. Nice. I really like the error mesage too. It says, “Updates failed to be successfully installed.” Passive voice.
So now I was really stuck. I’ve got Office 2003 and I don’t want that. And, I’ve got Vistual Studio 2005 which won’t install until I get Office that I don’t even need!
After retrying 3 times and a couple of reboots, it magically worked. I don’t know why.
Suite! (pun intended)
Update:
Alas, I’m still stuck. Turns out I have the “Microsoft Office 2003 Stanard Edition”. If I had the professional version, or just the word edition, or just excel, it would work. But the standard edition with everything just won’t work. Nice.
Back to the store tomorrow.
I guess the cause of my woes is that I bought the “Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System”. I got that version because the box made it sound like I otherwise might be missing something I’d want later. But I have no idea. The website is not very descriptive about what the differences between the products are. The box says its got additional support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, but I’m not sure if that is real or just a gimmock…. Do you get similar functionality to VS2003’s DB tools with just the standard edition? (See also)