Code Emporium

If you’ve ever installed Visual Studio, you’ll have seen the generic models that the installer cycles through on your screen. They all look exactly that; like models, with little resemblance to the average Visual Studio user. If you haven’t ever installed Visual Studio, here’s a taste:

Personally I find this to be the worst offender. When I saw this, I figured Ikea must be selling sweaters now. I’d hire him as an interior designer, but not as a software developer.

This guy you could conceivably find actually writing code, though I’d say he’d be in the top 1% presentation wise amongst the programming community, so hardly representative. I never noticed, but according to some, he has a face too small for his head also.

This picture isn’t actually too unrealistic, apart from the Colgate smile. I would however say that her presentation is still probably well above average for programmers. She is also a she, and lets face it, sad but true, most programmers are male.

All in all, they’re the usual suspects of corporate software installs; clean shaven, well dressed and in this particular case, look like they’ve probably never written a line of code before in their life. To Microsoft’s credit, the models they’ve used are far closer to reality than those shown in many other stock photos. I’m sure I could have chosen a much better example of an installer with superficial models, but I’m lazy. I was installing Visual Studio at the time, and you know the install is going to take long enough that you’ll have plenty of print screen opportunities.

I’ve always felt as though people would have more respect for a product if the models they used actually looked remotely like the people that use the product. So with my sub par photo editing skills, I drew up some prototypes for the programmer’s edition of Visual Studio, now featuring real programmers! With a bit of luck, you’ll see these babies in the Visual Studio 2010 installer. See if you can pick the characters.

See, it’s not so bad when you include an actual programmer in the photo. The expression is a little bit used car salesman, but I think this can be overlooked. I mean hey, he’s even wearing a suit (of sorts). Surely that’s enough to keep the corporate types happy.

Ok, so he’s wearing flannel. He might not win any fashion awards, but if you knew who he was you’d have huge restecp. Actually, the idea of getting to wear flannel while you work already earns my respect, even if you are just some hobo off the street.

Ok, so conceivably it would be a little more difficult pitching this one to Microsoft for the Visual Studio 2010 installer. I don’t even know what to say about this one. It either shows the stark contrast that occurs when you combine the head of a programmer with the body of a model, or the stark contrast that occurs when you do a particularly poor job of editing photos.

Once again, getting this one into the Visual Studio 2010 installer would be somewhat of a challenge. I’m not going to add anything to that, the picture says enough.

Truth be told, I suspect (and in some cases know) that the programmers above wouldn’t use Visual Studio anyway. Their photos just happened to be handy. Still, I imagine there’s plenty of .NET programmers out there whose appearance is a far stretch from the models you see in the installer. Nonetheless, it seemed only fitting to add one more concept image for the Visual Studio 2010 installer of someone who I’m sure would use Visual Studio if they were still programming on a daily basis.

On second thoughts, let’s just stick with using models…