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Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package 1.1

My primary hard drive crashed and I found myself in an unenviable position of having to reinstall the OS and a crapload of applications. Spare me the backup sermon please, the data was backed up. I didn't feel it was worth doing full backups because I haven't found a good (inexpensive) way to take them off-line and because sad as it is, it is still fairly healthy to repave a Microsoft OS once in a while.

That's not the point of this post though. Reinstalling VS.Net 2003, I watched yet again as it installed the Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package 1.1 as a prerequisite of the product. It is so pointless, it painful. Can anyone out there, please!, explain why VS.Net 2003 (and 2005, by the looks of it) force this down my throat?!?

Thanks!

UPDATE: See Aaron Stebner's (of Microsoft) comment to this post for an explanation. Thanks Aaron!!!

posted @ Sunday, August 8, 2004 11:57 PM

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# re: Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package 1.1

Left by Aaron Stebner at 8/17/2004 11:26 PM
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I can explain why you're seeing this behavior. It is more the result of expediency than anything else. When we were developing the setup for Visual Studio 2003, we didn't have any technology that would allow us to associate prerequisite components with features in the VS setup tree, and that release was a ~1 year point release, so we were basically restricted to the existing code base. For VS 2005 (codename Whidbey) there will be new logic that allows us to associate prereq components with features in the VS tree, so the J# redist will only be installed when you choose to install J# language tools in VS setup.

I do have to say that I don't understand why it is such a big deal to install the J# redist like this though - it is < 3 megs in size and doesn't harm anything, plus you can uninstall it immediately after you finish VS setup. I do agree it is pointless, but is it really painful?

If you have any comments/questions, please send them on to aaronste@microsoft.com

Thanks!
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