Silverlight Expired The Pain of Reinstalling
So I have been ignoring these messages I've been receiving for a while about Silverlight. Now I might not have ignored it, but it said my version of Silverlight expired. Ok so big deal. You might say, "Why not just go get a new version?" Well it says to go to a certain URL. You can't click on the URL, and you can't copy and paste the text. Typing URLs by hand is so mid 90's.
So the really annoying part of all of this. I just now navigated to that site by typing in all of that junk. And it takes me to the Silverlight page on the Microsoft site. http://www.microsoft.com/SILVERLIGHT/default_ns.aspx
I am also annoyed that the older versions of Silverlight don't still work. So I click the download link, and when the download completes I run the install, and this pops up on my screen.
What the hell shouldn't the link that the error message sent me take me to a page where the download will just work? Since it is the URL from the error message it should send me to instructions at least. So now that my install has failed at least I have a link to click on. It takes me to this nice page where I get some Silverlight help. It has links to actually go to the pages. The kind where I don't have to type in a URL by hand.
So it says I need to uninstall. Why wasn't I told this before I was sent to go download the Silverlight install at first? So just for kicks because I thought it was kind of funny to have it there. I clicked on the Silverlight Uninstall Instructions. The best thing ever happened. Going to that page gave me the error message again. So they actually try to have Silverlight content on the page with the instructions to uninstall Silverlight...... Now this is truly amazing. They actually have videos explaining how to uninstall Silverlight on this page, but they couldn't give me a link in the error message. They could have just said, "You will need to uninstall your current version of Silverlight. You can download a new version here." That would just be way too easy though.
Just thought I would share that nice bit of fun with you.
The moral of the story is probably something about not expecting error messages to give good information. Perhaps also that some install files aren't smart enough to handle an upgrade of any kind.