ISO files as means of distributing media
Why have microsoft decided to ship so much nowadays as
iso files. Well I for one am glad, why?
Well most of the time I am installing a new feature or on to a virtual
machine.
I don't want to carry round all the CDs for Office, SQL, Windows ... rather I
can store them on my had disk or a single USB drive and then use them from
there.
If I need to access the ISO from my machine, I use Daemon tools http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php. Which works
great. I do find I close it when I am not using it as it can often cause
explorer to hang.
As for virtual machines I use Virtual Server because I can get it to present
an ISO file on my machine as a CD to the virtul machine.
So I have no manipulation of the files and its very easy.
Aaron asks for zip files, personally when I get a self expanding zip I get
really annoyed (SQL CTP builds for instance) because I have to have space for
the exe and space for the expanded exe, (which more often than not is similar in
size. Plus I have to wait while the thing extracts, for a 2Gb file thats not a
short period of time. Further more the standard ZIP algorithm doesn't support
> 2gb and so you need to have another third party product i.e. winrar. which
can be used for free but is actually a paid for product.
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2007/10/28/msdn-isos-and-sql-server-hotfixes.aspx
-