Adventures in .NET

So today I am going to try and create a proof of concept application using VS2012 and a blank Lightswitch project. I'm interested to see how that goes. coming from the Java OSS side of life this will be my first attempt to build anything with the Lightswitch framework, .NET4.5 and my first application (as opposed to a simple service) with any of the above.

Let's see how it goes.

First hurdle, I have install the Oracle Developers Toolkit in order to get any kind of usefulness out of any of the frameworks. This already involves two things for me run the range of mildly annoying to rage induced blindness; installers and oracle drivers.

Having already gotten off to a stellar start and having plenty of time before the installer finishes, let me mention a couple of things that irritate me about both of those.

1) I know that drivers and frameworks and all that jazz for databases grow over time and can take up a lot of space but, come on, folks, why is my client side only install taking up more space than the actual frameworks that they are supporting. Really? REALLY??!?!?
Since when did a driver, even a development interface, become an instrument of the almighty advertisement? It really offends me that when all I want, care about or will ever use is a simple driver that *might* take up a few megabytes of disk space comes so bloated with crap that companies are desperate to get me to use that when the install is finished I have lost tens of gigabytes of disk space! Or maybe I'm narcissistic, maybe they don't want me to use any of that crap at all, maybe they just want to use me to pad the numbers they hand to declare how popular their widget(s) are by counting me in because I installed it. OK, now that I've contemplated that, I'm still offended! The end result is the same. I'm losing time, space and hence money because they want to saddle me with everything and the kitchen sink when all I wanted was a damned driver.

2) Why in the hell do they give me the option to choose my installation directory and then ignore my request? Seriously, (almost) every installer asks me where I would like to install my software to but once we get out of the tiny stuff and into things like Java, Oracle clients, and my all time favorite VS2012, the installer treats it as a strong suggestion at best and outright ignores it at worst. When I install VS2012 and it asks me where I want it to go and I say someplace on the F drive (my data drive) it will still install hundreds of gigabytes on the C drive, far more than what it installs on the F drive.
I have a small boot drive, not by choice, but because that's what was passed out to me when I first came on board here. When I got around to installing VS on my machine in spring of last year, it would't fit. I didn't have enough gigabytes on my boot drive to install even the bare minimum. Really? My IDE HAS to have access to the C: drive in order to function?? And if thats not the case, why are you ignoring the install directory preferences that you just solicited from your user?? Oracle does the same thing although not to nearly that extreme.

OK, looks like finally, close to an hour later, I am getting close to actually finishing the oracle install. I can't wait to see the next hurdle.