We finally put the Express skus up on the web.

Our first attempt was on Wednesday at midnight. We've been working on making our setups downloadable. We use the BITS technology to download the files and then install them. One of the major reasons for using BITS is to facilitate the downloading of large files. In total, we download around 250 megs of data. And given how finicky the Internet is, it can easily fail. BITS is designed to help out. Our first problem is that we set our timeout values too low. We BITS gets a failure we wait for a maximum of 30 seconds. This, as we found out, is too small. Within a few hours of posting the Beta Express skus we got information back from Watson and user reports that timeouts were our biggest cause of failures.

We scrambled to figure out how to fix the problem. Which as it turned out was just tweaking a couple of constants.

So our second attempt went up sometime Wednesday night.

I installed the second version on Tuesday night from a private drop. BE PATIENT it may look hung but it's not. So when I started the installation, it downloaded all the packages. This takes a while. In fact, my install sat at 279091 K for about 10 minutes. I guess the new timeout values worked because it kept waiting and eventually continued.

I already have Visual Studio 2002 installed on my machine so after it installed the .NET Fx 2.0, it rebooted. Here's where the fun happened. After the reboot, it continued but it look hung. The installation progress bar was at 100% and all the packages where checkmarked. Also, all the packages where in alphabetical order. This is the bug. As long as the hard drive light is going, which mine was, it's fine. It will take another 30 minutes or so depending on your machine to finish installing the rest of the packages.

It worked on my machine!

Let me know if you have any questions.

--Dan

VS Setup Team