There are so many different ways to configure SQL Server. My team does local database development, which means we had to install SQL Server. Manually installing applications also open the problem of misconfiguration. Babysitting installations are tedious, a waste of time, and expensive. Developers would often wait to kick off that installer until the end of the day or until their lunch hour. Other applications, like Visual Studio 2017, can take up to an hour to install, depending on the options chosen.

Some applications, like Visual Studio Code or Notepad++, install in less than a minute. Final Time-Suck: Manually Installing Applicationsīoth scenarios have a common problem: manually running the installer for each application.

After a month, chances are most of those applications are already out of date. Someone has to keep those applications up to date. That helps a developer when they get a new machine, they can just go to a folder and install all the applications. Another Time-Suck: Placing the latest version in a shared folderĪ common way I've seen organizations avoid the whole browse/download loop is to place all the common applications into a shared folder somewhere on the network. The key here is to know which application will most likely require a restart and which ones take the most time to finish. They can use the downtime waiting for applications to download by installing anything that completes. Depending on the application and the internet connection speed this could take anywhere from a minute to 30 minutes per application. As you can imagine this is a time suck because not only does a developer have to browse to each site, they also have to wait until the download finishes.

The developer navigates to each site and downloads the latest version of each application. It is lacking the tools every developer needs like Notepad++, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and so on. The machine had a common office suite of applications installed on it. A developer gets a new machine from corporate IT. A Common Time-Suck: The Browse/Download Loop This article will dive into automating the install of a common developer tool suite. The previous post in this series talked about why it is important to automate developer machine setup as well as getting Windows configured using DISM.

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