Just finished Day 7 of my Microsoft work placement, which is sadly drawing closer to it’s end. Even though today was not terribly exciting, we installed SQL Server 2005 onto the big bastard server (read my previous post) and then proceeded to install Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2005, which sounds innocent enough. However, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server doesn’t have your average “next-accept-next-next-finish” installer. There is a very strict guide you need to adhere to, you’ve got to install a heap of things onto your Server 2003 boxen and configure everything so TFS likes it. Do one thing wrong, and things can apparently (or so we’ve been told) become so screwed you’ve got to reformat the machine. After precariously following the setup checklist, we hit a snag. However, by that time, our supervisor had vanished, the work placement organiser had vanished, nobody was there to help us! Not even Google could find a viable solution for the problem we were having! (The setup guide references a hotfix which only is available as x86, we’re running on an x64 system). So we had a nice three-hour session of bludging on the internet and occasionally going out to check whether anyone was back yet. That was pretty boring, and frustrating, as we couldn’t really do anything but we couldn’t really leave. At least there were free drinks to keep us fuelled for our long nothingness-sessions. ^_^

One highlight of the day came early, with a new addition to the pile of freeeeeeee stuff!!!!!11!1111 Today’s gift is a t-shirt advertising Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions. The shirt touts it as the hottest legal download on the internet, which it pretty much is. Basically it’s a free copy of the core development languages in Visual Studio: Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual J++. If you haven’t already gotten a copy, get it now. I shall take a picture of my cool shirt at some stage, it’s nice.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m waiting for three 10MB emails to send on this low-bandwidth connection, not fun. I’m really hoping tomorrow I can do something with Vista, as that new build came out a few days ago, and I’ve glanced over at David’s newly-built rig and it looks like it’s running it, so I’d like to hope I get to take it for a spin soon

–Ben

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 10:11 pm and is filed under VITTA ICT Fellowship. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.