I tried installing Visual Studio 2005 into a VMware VM at work yesterday and that required some fiddling.

First I tried installing it as a normal non administrator and that didn’t work as the CD/DVD drive on the PC was hard wired, within the VM, to point to the network resource for the installation of Vista, from an .iso file, for a new VM. Tried setting the radio button to make the CD/DVD drive actually be a drive, rather than a pointer to a network file but it wouldn’t stick. Logged into the VM as an administrator user and was able to set the CD/DVD to not point to a network file and was then able to install Visual Studio. Logged out of the administrator user and back into the VM as a normal user and of course I couldn’t see VS at all. Dug around and found a likely looking .exe file and copied that to the desktop and that does run Visual Studio ok.

Today I thought I’d try and install Visual Studio 2008 onto my Vista PC at home. So far it has taken 45 minutes and the install is still running. A worryingly long time.

I often come upon sites where you have to create a username and password. I have just been to a site which wanted just that information and I had a devil of a job creating the account as it wouldn’t except my password.

It said that the password had to have at least one capital letter, at least one number, and in total it must be at least 6 characters long. I tried with one capital letter, a further five characters and finally two digits. That combination does satisfy their description, but it didn’t work. I then tried six capital letters followed by two digits. Nope, that didn’t work either. Then I tried six capital letters followed by one number, and that did work. How many people would have just given up after the first attempt. Do these companies realise how much business they probably lose just because propsective account holders can’t generate valid passwords due to the web site instructions being wrong.

I know the response you’d get from these guys if you somehow managed to talk to them about this. They’d probably say something like ‘well if you can’t figure out how to generate a username and password so you can’t even login then maybe you aren’t the kind of person we’re after’.