You’re downloading an application from the net, lets say an application that you were curious about but might not turn out to be of much use to you. What’s the biggest download size you’d accept? What size of download would make you think ‘I can’t be bothered’?
Keep that figure and mind and now consider whether you would mind so much if the download was small (say < 10MB) but the installer automatically downloaded a larger set of prerequisites, without requiring further intervention from you. Would that annoy you?
Answers in the comments please, the explanation for this curiosity follows.
Recently my life was entirely swallowed by a final year project at Uni and one of the handful of reasons for it taking so long is because at the 11th hour I changed the design.
Originally, my Desktop Search application (‘Oak’) was to use a Microsoft SQL Server Express database backend. Full of glorious developer friendly features (like .NET integration) it is a powerhouse of a database.
However, whilst building some initial test applications I made the horrifying discovery that rather than embed itself in my application, as I’d mistakenly thought it would, SQL Server Express insists on being run as Windows service. Since it’s not distributed as a key part of Windows that would have meant having to download about 40MB of SQL server, alongside the 20MB .NET 2.0 redistributable, alongside my application (lets say that’ll be somewhere around 6 meg).
This download size prompted me to switch from SQL Server to Firebird – which adds only 2MB to the application and runs embedded, not as a standalone service.
I made the change because one of my requirements was to produce an application that would be suitable for consumers to actually use. I felt that a 60 MB download for a Desktop Search system was unreasonable and therefore I would better meet my requirement by altering the design. I wouldn’t say that I regret the change, but learning Firebird’s variation of SQL did make life harder and it falls short of some SQL Server features that I’d been planning to use.
The thing is though, the .NET and SQL Server download doesn’t come as one big download. Instead, you would download my 6MB application and the installer (generated from Visual Studio 2005) automatically downloads and configures .NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 from Microsoft. So rather than a very long download time, you instead have a very long installation time.
Microsoft have worked quite hard to ease the effort of deployment, but I don’t know. Is it enough? If you installed my application and it set about download 60MB of prerequisites would you ignore it and let it finish off in its own time, or would you still think ‘sod this’?
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.