*sigh*

Like many other developers, I eagerly visited the MSDN subscriptions site yesterday to download my copy of Visual Studio 2008. The fact that I can get it this early as an MSDN subscriber is just awesome.

However, Microsoft don't seem to want me to have it.

Why do I think this? Because they make me use this abysmal download manager from a company called Akamai to get the file.

I left it running last night and came in this morning to be greeted with a nice error message about how the download encountered a fatal error and I'd have to restart it. I don't really want to risk having to restart the download of a 3GB file any more than a couple of times.

Not only that, while this download manager is running, I can't click on hyperlinks in Outlook or Live Mail. They simply don't work. Instead of opening in IE as they should, they switch focus to the download manager. It somehow hijacks the http protocol handler for links in Windows.

I'm not the only one who hates this (cr)application - check out this post from Richard Banks. Ooh! And this one from Nigel Spencer!

So yeah - I'll wait for the DVDs. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft (or should I be thanking Akamai?)!