Yo Microsoft! Get your act together, that was a rude, crude thing you did yesterday! VS 2008 is release with .NET 3.5 my ass! I went scurrying to my MSDN subscription to download that sucker and really get to reviewing the new material – HANDS ON! Here I am navigating to the download area and the only thing available ARE THE FREAKING 90 DAY TRIALS!!!!!
Who freaking cares about the 90 day trials on MSDN? Why the hell would anyone even download those! I’m liable to get uber vulgar about this rather disrespectful action. I know others have, so why does Microsoft wonder about their reputation when these things happen! Come on, the product is coming early, don’t goof it up with faux releases! ARGH.
Anyway, I guess I’ll keep plugging along with VS 2005 for a few more days. On a positive note, dibs to the early release Microsoft!
UPDATE
In addition to all the confusion this other download manager has caused, it seems that I wasn’t the only person having issues.
They are there, they are just hard to find. You can’t get to them via the normal tree view. Go to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx and they’re in the gray shaded section near the middle of the page, below the trial versions.
Yes, it’s stupid.
I figured it out. I was mislead by their stating that each version would be released subsequently. Hmmm… I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean.
I did go back and try it again. I noticed something was flashing, an active X download, when I clicked on it. Since it would just refresh the page I knew something was wrong. I figured, why not try a browser that is more informative. Thus I started up FireFox and navigated to the page. There I clicked on the link for the professional version and a certificate confirmation came up. I then downloaded the Java Akamai download manager and the download started.
…this wasn’t convoluted or anything. [sarcasm] doh! It is also odd how IE7 did not even inform that a popup had been blocked. Firefox, as always came to the rescue. If there weren’t so many oddball proprietary things on the MSDN site I wouldn’t even use IE7, because even though it is "the one that works", it often doesn’t work for parts that should be a breeze.
Argh!
I also tried this same step in Opera, which worked perfectly, and in addition I even skipped the Akamai download assistant and just started a straight download in Opera’s download manager.
I’m not sure why IE7 didn’t want to report this particular "popup" like any other regular popup it reports, but it didn’t.
Regardless, I am finally downloading the product now and can’t wait for it to finish!