Does size matter...
So we've been having some interesting hallway conversations (someone should do a study on how hallway meetings are such a great alternative to doing real work), and one of the things that came up was would it be OK if the Longhorn SDK came as one blob instead of being spliced into “Avalon” or “WinFS” or “Managed/Un-managed”? Adding up all the SDKs, the “back of the envelope” number we came up with would be 3 GBs. Before you freak out, consider hard disk space is getting really cheap (around 5-10 cents per MB), and falling. If you'd prefer not to do the download over the internet (I can hear one of my friends from the UK who pays for his bandwidth getting ready to kill me if there isn't an alternative), you could order the DVD.
Personally, I'd be OK with this if I could tune which pieces were always “up to date” so only the pieces I cared about used my bandwidth to stay current. The big benifit I see here is that my documentation/samples/tools are always available even if I'm on a flight or my spotty internet connection went down, and search would be blazingly fast since everything is local.
So what do you think? Would you like this, do you even care if you couldn't tune if the entire SDK always stayed up to date using your internet connection?
Mitch posted a related question on his blog and the replies indicated this direction was worth exploring.
