Existentialism meets Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 Installs
Be forewarned that this is going to be one of thoes “What's Bill Smoking” types of posts. However I am 'all natural' in that regard so any weirdness is purely just a coincidence. Back in undergrad I was a philosophy major as I've mentioned a few times. The particular department was run by “Existentialists” when I was there. They also had this philosophy (no pun intended) that if they made you spend every waking moment reading stuff, you'd probably never figure out that you had 0 chance of making a living with your degree once you graduated. So one of the pieces we had to read was a play called “No Exit” by Jean Paul Sartre. He was a pretty popular dude for much of the 20th century and no self respecting snob, uhh, I mean enlightened intellectual would have missed some of his more mainstream stuff like No Exit. I remember he had another book called Being and Nothingness. For you non-Philosophy majors out there, and those without a background in Existentialism, you probably never read Being and Nothingness nor does any part of it interest you.
Today though, as has been the case for the past few months, I felt Sartre alive and wel each time I tried to install Visual Studio .NET 2005. You see, one of the big insights you get to learn about in Existentialism is the HUGE distinction between 'being' and “Being” You pragmatic types would probably say “Well, I see the difference, the first one is all lower case letters but the second one has a capital letter in it”. We actually spent 3 classes learning the distinction between “Being in the world” as opposed to “being in the world”. This distinction was Heideggerian but it was quite typical of the stuff we studied. So what does all this crap have to do with installing Visual Studio .NET. Well, “No Exit” was about Existentialist Hell . You probably haven't read much about this either, but if you ever heard a joke where the punch line is “So the Devil says, 'Actually he doesn't have i made. His bottle of Expensive French Champagne has a hole in it, and his beautiful blonde is without one”. The essence of which is simply that things aren't always what they appear -- this is accomplished with a bunch of irony for dramatic effect. So I was thinking “Installing Beta 2 is kind of like a really bad version of No Exit. It's like Existentialist Hell, just a little suckier” but something about the metaphor didn't hold. So I got to thinking about Being and Nothingness.... A HA, that's it. You see, once I start Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 2, it looks like it's going to work. That is, until I open something up at which point is simply goes away. It doesn't error, doesn't give me any messages, it just goes away. No event log entires, Nothing. I even got an error trying to compile from the command line, which asked me if I wanted to debug. After saying yes, it started the IDE and looked like it was going to debug, but then just simply vanished. So that's what Beta 2 has been for me, Being and Nothingness with a heavy emphasis on the Nothingness (if you're wondering, 'Nothingness' and 'nothingness' are the same thing)
But here's where things strike me more on the No Exit side. You see, here are the instructions that must be followed to the T:
If you have installed previous versions of Visual Studio 2005, such as Beta 1 or Community Technical Preview (CTP) builds of Visual Studio Team Suite, Visual Studio Standard or Visual Studio Professional, then you must uninstall the pre-Beta2 components in the exact order below before beginning to install any version of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2.
- Go to the Control Panel and launch Add/Remove Programs
- .......
10 - Remove all Microsoft Visual Studio Versions (such as "Visual Studio 2005 Professional Beta")
But look at this error message wshen I follow the instructions “IN THE EACT ORDER BELOW BEFORE BEGINNING TO INSTALL ....“
