Customer feedback and suggestions for VS.NET 2005 and MSDN 2005

Below are listed some feedback taken directly from customers supported by Microsoft on ways to improve Visual Studio .NET 2005 and MSDN 2005 (please feel free to email me to add more to this list or comment the blog directly):

• Users should be warned prior to starting setup that the setup may take more than an hour to complete
• Instead of saying “this may take several minutes” during the MSDN installation, the user should be prompted with an actual or estimated time remaining
• The MSDN maintenance mode installation should allow a user who has performed a minimal install to go back and select a full install later on, which it currently does not. You must uninstall MSDN and then reinstall using the full option.
• During the install, when you enter a product key that is good but for a different version of VS.NET you are told that the key is invalid the first time you launch Visual Studio .NET 2005. This problem existed as one of the top ten issues back in VS.NET 2002 and 2003. Customers would like to be prompted to enter a valid product key instead of having to uninstall VS.NET 2005 and reinstalling it with the new key.