Developing For .NET

If you’ve been following my journey, you’ll know that Monday morning, after 4 years as a .NET developer, I finally subscribed to MSDN.? I did so in anticipation of the release of Visual Studio 2008, which occurred Monday afternoon.? Needless to say, I was very excited by all this.? My excitement began to dwindle though, the longer I had to wait to get confirmation of my MSDN subscription.

Finally, Tuesday afternoon, I was able to get confirmation over the phone and received my Subscriber Benefits Number (the magic number that lets you in to all of MSDN’s goodies).? Oh, and I still haven’t received any kind of email notification that the process has been completed, so if I hadn’t gotten impatient and called I’d still be waiting.

So yesterday afternoon I began the VS2008 RTM download.? It is 3.31 GB, so it will naturally take a long time to download.? When I left to go home, it was about 30% finished.? I figured that it would finish downloading, and that this morning I would be knee-deep into installation.? Unfortunately, at 2.01 GB, the Download Manager experienced a fatal error.? I could not resume the download and had to restart it again from scratch this morning.? I feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football up on him at the last second.? Good Grief!

OK, so I’m just full of complaints today:

• It seems I have to reenter my Live password every 3-4 pages.? I’ve reenterred it at least three times in the last 40 minutes (and that is with the “Remember my userid and password” box checkd on the login page.
• One time when I reentered the login, I was sent to a “Session expired page” and had to log in AGAIN.
• I like the MSDN interface better than the MSDN Subscriber interface, it would be nice if they standardized the two.

OK, so I’m just nitpicking this morning because I’m frustrated.? I really hope I can finish this download today so I can play over the holiday! (Sheesh, now I’m rhyming.? Time to quit for now…)