RIM You Owe Me $450 or 3 Hours of My Life Back
Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in .Net | Posted on 08-08-2007
I’m sitting eating lunch and it just hit me that I wasted three hours of my life last night trying to install the Blackberry Plugin for Visual Studio that was recently released. I tried to install it on 2 different machines and it kept trying to install SQL Server Express 2005 although it was already installed. I told it to skip the SQL Server Express install and it canceled the install. Yeah, the whole thing. I then told it to go ahead and try to install it hoping it would bomb and then move on. It did bomb and appeared to be running through the rest of the install but then it would die.
I spent a total of three hours trying to get this plugin to install. RIM, if you are going to publish an installer at least make sure it works. Did you test it on Vista? How about x64? Did you assume that no one would have express already installed? You do know there is a SP2 upgrade for express to even work under Vista? Why was this bundled in with the installer in the first place? I can’t believe the installer relies on SQL Server Express. Really this just blows my mind that an installer would need express just to install. WTF?
RIM, I’ve lowered my hourly rate to $150 since it was after hours so you only owe me $450 for this time wasting adventure. I will only accept cash, sending me a $450 Blackberry is not acceptable.
Fair enough on the supported OS, but does that justify them to release a product for an operating system that has been released to developers for almost a year? It is like you are saying, hey, it is ok BB if you folks are a year behind and don’t support Vista. Imagine if you went out and bought a new video card and it didn’t work with Vista! No difference same thing. Just bad form all the way around. This is even a worse offense in my book than not working at all.
BS yes, but maybe you should have read the release notes, note the lack of Vista.
System Requirements
• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Standard or Professional
• 1 GHz processor
• 1 GB of RAM
• Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Service Pack 4, Microsoft Windows XP® Service Pack 2, or Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 Service Pack 1
http://www.blackberry.com/knowledgecenterpublic/livelink.exe/fetch/2000/8067/645045/8655/1364957/1364836/BlackBerry_Plug-in_for_Microsoft_Visual_Studio_Version_1.0_Release_Notes_and_Known_Issues_List?nodeid=1366953&vernum=0