Installing Visual Studio 6.0

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I have some ideas that I think, bizarre as it may seem, Visual Studio 6.0 might actually be useful for. Yep, this is the version that came out in 1998. I still have my original copy from around that time. This was before all that new-fangled .NET stuff came out.

I had Linux on this old laptop, so first things first we'll need Windows. I was using NT 4.0 back when I originally worked with this stuff, but that doesn't support USB without some fiddling around, and I have XP as well, so here we go.

Screenshot of the first screen of the Windows XP installation process. A blue screen with white text, titled ‘Windows XP Professional Setup’.

That worked without a fuss. I'd forgotten about that famous Bliss background.

A screenshot showing the freshly installed Windows. No programs are running. The start menu is open titled with the username ‘geoff’ and the chess pieces icon next to it. The desktop background

Now for the real deal. I managed to find my old CD for Studio. I must have got this around the year 2000, because .NET came out in 2002.

An installation screen from early in the process of installing Visual Studio. It shows a title card on most of the screen introducing the software. A small dialog box in the bottom right corner shows the progress at 1% as it is beginning to copy files into place.

It mostly went fine, but this is… interesting:

An installation screen from later in the Visual Studio installation process. A large dialog box in the background shows the progress with a progress bar, and is titled ‘BackOffice Component Installation’. A small dialog box is on top of it, but all it contains is the icon indicating that it's an error, and an ‘OK’ button. There is no title and no message, so it's impossible to know what the error is.

I've been tinkering, and it's starting to come back to me.