This is something i conjured up while waiting for microsoft's Platform SDK to drag its 400 MB ass onto my laptop at work one day. I was getting something like 4 KB per second! So i wrote this:

Why i hate closed source "i will get it for you" installers:

• No mirroring, if the one place where all the stuff is located is slow, everyone suffers, no one can improve this (apart from the guys providing the installer), because no one can mirror the files that are fetched.
• You can't "save" the installation to disk for later usage, you always have to be connected to the internet to install them. And what happens when the company goes belly-up or re-arranges their files on the file-server ? Installation stops working!
• Hard to know if anything is happening, apart from monitoring your network traffic it is very hard to know how fast the downloadning occurs. If it was "one big file "your browser" or other downloading tool" could give much more precise information on the downloading tools. Automatic download tools can be really cool, actually Debian's apt-get system can be considered to be one such system, but here everyone is free to mirror the stuff being downloaded (actually it's encouraged).

A windows example is the MikTeX package, instead of installing all the TeX packages, it downloads the ones you need - in the midddle of compiling! This is just awesome, the first time you use a package, it is automatically downloaded from your preferred mirror - and compilation commences when the package has been downloaded and installed.

Now that is cool!

Another thing, what exactly is the difference between the Visual Studio C++ 2005 .net .blah version 7.0 commin-to-get'cha' express and the C++ in the standard Visual Studio ?

According to microsoft you don't get COM, MFC and ATL - but that comes with the Platform SDK - at least COM does - not sure if i tried ATL - haven't coded MFC gui since i discovered Gtk+.

Is this really finally a free compiler from microsoft, of cource that is completely unbeliable, microsoft is the only OS vendor in history who has gotten away with selling an operating system that you couldn't extend out of the box.

I mean come on, the whole point of a computer, and what sets it aside from all other machines, is the extensibility aspect, i guess Microsoft is just selling wash-machines anyway.

And you still have to wade through millions og pages of legal bumbo-jumbo.

Ahh, that felt good! My adrenaline level is back to normal.

Thanks for listening.