Two different install locations?

First of all, big thanks to all of you who responded to my post last week re the poor download stats for the SDK. I really appreciate all your responses, and I've already used them in one meeting so far. I promise to get back to you later this week on my investigation of Microsoft and BitTorrent. I know we don't use that technology, but I'm curious what the specific corporate reason for that is. I wanna know what we do to mirror our content around the world, and what the recommended ways are to handle large downloads. I'll post again on this topic when I have a few more answers.

I wanted to get your feedback on something else our team has been debating: the question of where exactly to install content.

Background: In Windows Vista, files that can be modified have to be installed to a location outside of the Program Files directory. But the SDK installs to Program Files. So where do we put our samples, which are created to be modified? The answer we came up with was to post them to \Documents and Settings\All Users\My Documents, which then would make them available for each member of a team to use.

Does that concept make sense?

Second issue, relaated to that, is that we're going to add Custom Install Locations for RC1. If you have the ability to change one location, do you want to change another? If so, how do you think the screen should look? If I'm using this blog software right, a mockup of this options screen is attached below. What do you think of it?

No hype - I'm using this data to help drive these decisions. Thanks in advance.

InstallLocations.jpg

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2006
    Personally, I always install all my various SDKs into a non-Program Files folder (C:ProgrammingSDKs).  So I never have the issue regarding Samples.

    What I would like to see for the Vista SDK is the change of the "v1.0" to be changed to "v6.0" since Vista is version 6.0. :-)
  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2006
    Funny, we've been debating that one, too... it's the v1.0 of the Windows SDK for v6.0 of the OS.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    I would love to see both of these being customizable.

    The UI would look something like having two folder location textboxes instead of one - or maybe the custom install runs through Step 1 of custom install and Step 2 of custom install.

    Regards
    Pandurang
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    I noticed the attachment after I posted - yes that was what I had in mind for the first option.

    The second is that since it is part of "custom install" - you might want to select features for both of them - and then having them on two different screens might be less confusing.

  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2009
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