VS.NET 2005 SP1 (team suite) available for download!

Get it while it's hot: VS.NET 2005 Team suite SP1 RTM download (via Dennis)

Update:Scott Guthrie writes that you should uninstall the Web Application Project add-in first if you have that one installed, as the SP1 installer chokes on that.

At the moment, the SP1 installer is already busy for more than 20 (!) minutes to get started: first preparing, now it's gathering required information, and it's sooooooooo slooooooowww it's unbelievable. It takes 100% CPU usage on my Xeon 3Ghz box and it takes such a tremendous amount of time to even get to the copying of the files, it's hard to come up with any rational reasons why this installer is so awfully slow. The 'gathering required information' stage is now already trying to get information for over 15 minutes and the progress bar is half way! A 3Ghz CPU is very very fast, this definitely doesn't have to be so incredibly slow. What's also odd is that there's no disk activity. So apparently it's simply doing in-memory calculations and registry searches... wouldn't it be great if data was stored in some kind of database so you could query it and you got response instantly? If only a company would create such a 'database'..... oh wait...

What's odd is that when you do a repair install, it's much faster. So apparently repair knows which elements are installed, but this SP1 has a bit of a problem with finding information. So be prepared to spend a loooooooong time on installing this service pack. With over 2200 fixes, it's well worth it, but be patient.

Update 2: oh no.... I had 2GB free on my C: partition. During installation, it starts whining it has not enough disk space available to install a file, I saw I still had the vista iso downloaded from MSDN on the drive so I removed that. I click the 'Retry' button... But that causes an internal unexpected error (yeah, ever seen an expected error?) and everything rolls back. Now I have to start all over. . So be sure you have LOADS of diskspace otherwise you'll be repeating this Bad Excuse for Efficient Software Engineering over and over again...

Update 3: Ok cleaned up some disk space, and I'm running the SP1 installer again. I now see it eats up 450MB (!) of memory. Erm... what? Ok, I'll stop wondering what this installer is doing behind the scenes, it only makes me sadder and sadder, just get the files on the disk, reg the darn dlls and be done with it...

Update 4: After more than an hour, it's finally installed. Hurray... It eats away 1.5GB of diskspace at least, more than 450MB of ram, for over 35 minutes 100% of the CPU time because it had to 'gather information' (I have no clue what piece of code can do that long to gather information. I mean, reading all file information of the complete harddisk takes 1minute 15 on my system...) Also, if it rolls back because of an error (and it's pretty silly so assume the worst: it can't skip actions like skipping the Web Application Project add-in, you have to uninstall that manually), be sure to remove the redundant .msp file from c:\windows\installer, because it eats away 445MB at least and for no reason at all.

So, let's hope the guys who wrote the installer didn't work on the fixes. FWIW, VS.NET 2005 runs fine after installation of this SP1, haven't seen any glitches yet. I do feel sorry for these poor sods who have to re-install VS.NET 2005 some time in the future and have to wade through this remarkable silly installer again...

Perhaps they should add a sudoku puzzle to the installer so you've something to do...