I try to keep on top of the various important releases from Microsoft, testing assumptions and seeing what's new with each release. Tonight I decided to install the September 2005 CTP of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

While it seems like a pretty trivial exercise to update to a new release - and from a difficulty perspective it is - it is remarkable how much time each of these iterations takes. While I don't need to sit here looking at the screen for the duration of the install, there nonetheless is a lot of user interaction that is necessary (even if it's just saying okay to random dialogs), and it soaks up PC resources for quite some time. First one performs all of the various deinstalls of the prior iteration, and the lengthy installs of the new one. Add in various incompatibilities just for fun. "Whoops, I have the Visual Studio July CTP .NET Framework, which is conflicting with the September CTP of SQL Server 2005". Almost sounds like ".dll hell". Of course to really keep on top, add in all of the CTPs of Visual Studio, and the other tools. You can basically fill your days uninstalling and installing various tools.

There is no real "point" here, and I can't see any possible solution (except for perhaps completely touchless installs that require zero interaction from setup.exe to finish), but it could be the reason why so few people seem to have any hands on experience with either SQL Server 2005, or Visual Studio 2005.