Today, in a rather desperate attempt at improving the performance of my demo by running it on a different machine than usual, I went about installing MS Visual Studio on a machine that was otherwise Visual Studioless. Microsoft is nice enough to provide a free 90 day trial version, so I downloaded that and went about installing it. Except I couldn’t, because they distribute the installer as an .iso file. So what’s the problem? An .iso file is a disk image, which Windows is able to burn to a CD. That’s fine enough, except I didn’t have a CD handy, and even if I did I wouldn’t want to waste it on burning the .iso. After all, why do I have to move the bits from my computer to a CD just in order to get them back onto my computer? They are there to begin with!

And then I discover, shockingly, that Windows XP doesn’t know how to mount an .iso. I would think this was basic functionality, and it is functionality provided by a number of non-free third party software suites, but Windows doesn’t know about it. So, Microsoft is distributing a free trial version of its development software, trying to attract developers to its platform, and is distributing that software in a format that is nothing short of a gigantic pain in the butt.

Eventually I discovered that there is an unofficial, unsupported .iso mounter available from Microsoft. I imagine somebody internally sat there trying to install Visual Studio (or something similar) and thought “This is bullshit. Why the hell can’t Windows mount an .iso?” So they went and wrote a utility to do it.

And of course, on a totally different topic, Apple’s developer tools are entirely free.

Oh, and as I was writing this my Windows machine went to sleep, in the middle of importing a video from my video camera. Thanks Windows! I didn’t actually want that anyway! And the importing application crashed in the process (the second time in the last 1/2 hour). As Christian Bale would say: “you’re a fucking amateur, you know that?”