Thanks Windows Autmatic Update for wasting my morning!

So I come into work this morning and fire up my dev virtual machine and am quickly hit with a pegged out CPU and mostly unresponsive applications. I pull up Task Manager to see what is up. Show all processes and notice msiexec and TrustedInstaller taking up the bulk of the cpu. I then realize I never turned off Automatic Update on this new dev machine. I look further down the list and notice vs90sp1-kb971092-x86.exe. Quick search to see what this new patch is and I'm less than happy when I see.

So WTF is vs90sp1-kb971092-x86.exe? It's the installer for the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 ATL Security Update. I'm a little unsure why this patch is installing now since I did an update of everything about a month ago (which was still after it was released). What kills me about this one is the sheer size of it. The patch is 365.2 megs. WTF guys? An almost 400 meg 'Security Update'? Really? WTF did you forget to add that requires a patch that is half the size of the VS install itself?!?! That on top of the Ridiculous patching system VS has you're left with an update that was pushed on you (unless you have automatic update set to Not install automatically [which I usually do]) that takes an absurd amount of space and processing just to install.

What's even better about all this is that if this patch fails during install because of lack of disk space it will just continue to try to install it over and over again. Which can easily happen since this update can require around 3.7GB for Windows Update to do it's thing. That's right folks 3.7 Gigs!  This according to Heath Stewart's post on this patch. Again WTF guys?  Just because storage (RAM and physical) is getting cheaper doesn't mean you get to completely Rape my computer while doing things 'behind the scenes'.

So yeah, my bad for not having Automatic Updates turned off but seriously guys this whole patching system VS uses completely Sucks!!! If MS doesn't get their *** working better I'm going to start looking at doing .NET development in another IDE. And if you think I'm kidding you don't know me very well. I'm beginning to wonder when I'm going to say to hell with all of this MS garbage and just do everything in Eclipse on my Mac running under Mono. I'm definitely going to give VS2k10 a go but if they *** that one up too I'm probably switching.