I am these weeks pushing all my dev teams (near 40 people) of my daily job to upgrade from old versions of Visual Studio (2003-2013) to Visual Studio 2015, and all I hear from the first people taking the task are horror stories about the VS 2015 taking “hours” to install or “the whole day”. Their laptops are not more than 3 years old (my company renews them after that period) but I know they have 4 GB of memory, and most importantly, HDD disks instead of SSDs. I will try to convince management to pay the hardware upgrades to 8 GB of memory and SSD disks, but the VS 2015 setup experience couldn’t be worse for them. I will also take a look at why it takes so long on their computers, because they were instructed to install only the required components (desktop and web development with VB.NET/C#) and in my experience that should not take more than 1 hour on a computer with a HDD disk. I bought myself a Microsoft Surface 4 Pro for work some months ago and I think that VS 2015 installed in “only” 30 minutes, which surprised me a lot.

Microsoft is well aware of the painful setup experience for Visual Studio since long time ago, and they have decided to improve it a lot in the new VS “15” (not to be confused with VS 2015) with a new minimal install, optional “Stacks” or “Workloads” (name still to be decided), and isolated, low-impact, MSI-free, GAC-free, registry-free components:

This was a first post on the Visual Studio blog: Faster, Leaner, Focused on Your Development Needs: The New Visual Studio Installer. And today there is a new post: On the Road to Release: Redesigning Visual Studio Installation that provides a couple of interesting things:

• A presentation (47 slides) with the rough UI mockups of the new Visual Studio Manager.
• A small survey that you can complete to help Microsoft to refine the setup. Please take a moment to fill it.