I’m working on a few client projects that are dragging me back into the wonderful world of ASP.Net. One is a project that was originally written in VB. It was a total disaster, the previous consultant disappeared, and I’ve been hired to create a new site from scratch. For that one, I’m using PHP/MySQL, but need to dig up stuff from the old DB and code base.
For my other, more exciting project, we’ll be using C#/ASP.Net because that’s what the rest of the company uses. No problem – I have Parallels running on my MacBook Pro (4G ram). I installed VS2008 Express, and things are moving along fairly smoothly. I’ve even done some successful SOAP calls out to an external web service.
WELL, today, I realized that for some reason, when VS2008 Express installs SQL Server, it doesn’t include SQL Server Management Studio – a fairly critical tool for working with SQL Server! Well, that should be easy to add, right?? Well, NO, this is Microsoft after all. I searched around on the web, found that I needed to install a version “with Tools”. OK, well, why wasn’t that the default? No matter – I download it, run the installer and pick the item that looks something like “upgrade existing installation”. Great, just what I want to do! Well, everything is disabled, and there is no sign of the Management Studio in the list of things to add. Grr. So, I kill another hour searching on the web and FINALLY find someone who has the answer. Apparently you need to FIRST run something called an “Edition Upgrade” and THEN you can re-run the installer and add the new tools/features. So, I did that and finally got the tool I needed.
This is such classic Microsoft product behavior – confusing and opaque – there was NO clue about what was wrong or how to proceed when I hit the roadblock. Clearly, there’s a rule in the code that describes what needs to happen, but that never makes it out to the UI.
Aside from all of this, VS2008 looks pretty nice. Stay tuned for more updates as they happen!