Another user experience brought to you by Microsoft

Just so I’m not accused of being biased in favor of Microsoft, let me bring you an example of the user experience we’ve all come to expect from this company.

So today, looking to expand my budding WPF knowledge by working on a Silverlight application, I decided to download the Silverlight 2 Toolkit from MSDN.  Easy enough, right?  Not quite.  Here is a summary of my experience:

1. Visited http://msdn.microsoft.com.  Conveniently, there was a link on the left pane of the web site labeled Silverlight, so I clicked on this and it led to a page that pointed me in the right direction to install “Microsoft® Silverlight™ Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1”.  Now, I assume that I have VS2008 SP1 installed.  I mean, if I didn’t, it would have shown up in Microsoft Update, right?  So I ran the installer.

2. Oops!

I guess I didn’t have it installed.  Weird, I was sure I keep my computer up-to-date with Windows Update.  No worries, I just clicked the link as provided and it conveniently took me to the installer for VS2008 SP1. 

3. I downloaded SP1 and ran the installer.  Uh oh, another problem:

Ah well, I guess I have to run some program to clean up the beta I installed a while ago.  So I clicked the link, downloaded and ran the installer.  Then I ran the SP1 update.  Then I ran the Silverlight 2 installer.  I have to wonder why this couldn’t have been done for me somehow.

Now let’s pretend that I’m not Vargo.  I’m another user who attempts to solve the problem another reasonable way.  Instead of clicking the first link to download VS2008 SP1, I go to Windows Update to look for the update.  I see nothing.  So I open Visual Studio and select Help->Check For Updates.  This can’t fail, right?  Wrong.  Not only does it take me to the same Windows Update site which failed me previously, but it opens it in my default browser: Firefox, and I get an error stating that I need to load the Windows Update site in Internet Explorer in order to get it to work!  MSN—no, sorry—“Windows Live” Messenger has no qualms about annoying me by opening hyperlinks in my non-default browser; why can’t Visual Studio do the same thing when it’s actually necessary!

Microsoft really has some work to do when it comes to the user experience.  But I’m not really shocking anyone here.