Four Island

Let me show you a quote from our IRC conversation two days ago. We had gotten onto the topic of .NET technologies and other Microsoft products after I told Smiley that I had started to look into learning a bit of ASP.Not (I mean ASP.NET--I just like to make fun of them :P ) just a few hours earlier and Tamasys was, as usual, berating me for my usual lack of excitement over Microsoft products (I say usual because I quite like C#--on Mono, that is :P ). When I asked what "Silverlight" was:

(12:39:57 AM) Smiley: suddenly ninjas, thousands of them
(12:39:57 AM) Tamasys: O_o
(12:40:05 AM) Tamasys: how do you not know what Silverlight is?
(12:40:08 AM) Tamasys: **attacks**
(12:40:18 AM) Hatkirby: Hmm, let's see, I'M A LINUX FANGIRL YO
(12:40:20 AM) Tamasys: silly Linux person..

Yeah, and there's a reason for that.

So, yesterday, I was working with ASP.Not a little bit more. I was following a tutorial from the Microsoft website and it would occur quite frequently that something wouldn't work and I would have to jump through some massive flaming hoops to get it to work with Mono. After slaving over DbLinq, switching to PostgreSQL, switching back to MySQL and adding foreign keys just to find that I couldn't have something called "navigation properties", I was like "yo" and decided to try writing an ASP.Not website using the official, Microsoft IDE.

Yeah, no. At first, I tried installing it in my virtual machine, but then I realized that that was really, really stupid and it was just so stupid that it was stupid. Then, I tried restarting into my Windows Vista partition and installing it there. I clicked on some Microsoft Web Platform thing which was linked to from the tutorial and decided to install it. When the wizard came up, I noticed that "Visual Web Designer Express" was missing from the list somehow, but I shrugged it off and pressed install.

Then this happened. Twice.

I AM GOING TO HIRE SOMEONE TO KILL YOUR FAMILY, WEB PLATFORM INSTALL! This download manager was surely the spawn of the devil. The first time I tried installing stuff, it hung at the first item (IIS), it's stupid indeterminate progress bar giving me no indication whatsoever that something real was actually happening. I eventually had to cancel the wizard after about 10 minutes of nothing happening, which, after 5 minutes of "cancelling", told me that I was an idiot and everything was going fine until I rolled along. I stabbed it with a knife and tried again.

The second time I tried installing stuff, it told me that I had already installed IIS and some other stuff which I surely had not as nothing new had appeared in the Start Menu and the program once again hung at the first item. However, this time, it wouldn't cancel and it started dancing around the screen like an epileptic tapeworm on ice and the Task Manager didn't help anything at all by joining the dance party and winning three awards. I had to use the command prompt to kill Task Manager, which somehow, instead, made it stop dancing, and then used it to kill the installer. God.

After that, I started getting errors such as "Your operating system is not supported." Wtf, I was running Windows Vista. Granted, it's one of the worst operating systems of all time, but surely it was supported by Web Platform Install. I mean, I just ran it twice. I clicked the link and read that only Vista Service Pack 2 was supported. I checked my computer and sure enough, I only had Service Pack 1. So, I, being the optimistic trashcan that I am, decided to install it.

No. Just.... no. First, Windows took 20 minutes installing auxiliary updates (after which I had to restart, of COURSE) before actually allowing me to start the upgrade process, which it warned would take around an hour. Okay; I took out my summer reading book and worked away at that while Vista downloaded and then installed the upgrade. I checked the screen after every page so that when the computer inevitably restarted, I could tell GRUB to boot into Windows again.

About an hour later, after I had finished about a chapter and a half of my book, I looked up and saw something horrible, something truly hideous on my screen.

WHAT THE AMANDA PALMER'S MIDDLE NAME?!?!?!?! So it decides that after an hour of installing pointless garbage on my computer and reaching 100% on all three stages of the upgrade that NOW it would fail? If there was something seriously wrong, it surely could have been checked during the installation, or even before it. Anyway, I was now too furious to continue reading my book and I sat in my chair, waiting for perhaps 20 minutes while Windows uninstalled the service pack. God.

When the computer restarted again, after it had done some more uninstalling, it finally let me back into Windows. But really, what was the point? Nothing happened--I was still on service pack one. On a whim, I decided to run Web Platform Install again. Despite having even less available items to install this time, it actually (sort of) worked. I left it running in the background and 10 minutes later, it told me that it had installed one item and wanted to restart. "Oh god, please shoot me," was probably what I was thinking at that point.

So, find, I restarted the computer. Except, when the computer turned back on, it said "Uninstalling Service Pack". WTF? You already did that! Plus, it can't be anything serious--I was just using Windows! OH MY GOD I THINK I MIGHT EXPLODE. I was really quite angry at this point--and suddenly, I had a vision of what might happen if I had to use Windows all the time. I drew a little comic of what it might look like:

Image of me copyright Drifty. Image of Laptop probably copyright Acer. Image of window copyright I don't know and I don't care. :P

Later on, when my computer had finished it's reboot and finished installing everything, I found that not only was I right about Visual Web Developer not being installed, but that it was also the reason I was getting the error message before! The only reason I was able to successfully install the other stuff was because I used a different link to download Web Platform Installer, one that didn't include Web Developer and now that I did want it, I would have to upgrade to the latest Service Pack.

It was at this point that I decided to stop being so lazy and just write the one extra query needed to replace the need for navigation properties.

I'm a Linux fangirl, foo. :P