Is There No Way To Test This Thing?

Realizing that I had absolutely no way to test it on my network at home, I decided to do the next best thing and test it at work (where I am right now).  So I packed up my laptop and headed to the office.  I chose a nice, quiet room with its own local LAN and some of the most up-to-date technology we have in the entire building.  I thought that I'd be able to complete the project while having an entire afternoon with a pretty fast, reliable network all to myself.  Once again, I was sadly mistaken.


I installed Dropbox on two of the computers so I could synchronize them with my workspace.  I had forgotten that my Perforce directory still contained all of the projects from my last class with Professor Keenan, so that took a lot longer than expected.  No problem -- I still had a few more hours before I had to get back home.

The first unfortunate discovery was that the game didn't run.  At all.  So I checked to see what version of XNA was installed here.  It's 3.1, not the 4.0 that the project requires.

So I tried to install the version of XNA that Professor Keenan put in Perforce.  It said that I couldn't install it without having Visual Studio 2010 or Visual C# 2010 installed first.  This room only has 2005 and 2008, so I started installing Visual C# 2010.  After a painfully long wait, it finally completed, and then told me that I had to restart the computer to finish the installation.  Well...that's not an option.  When these computers reboot, they get re-imaged, so everything that I'd just done would get wiped out.  Right down the drain go a few hours of downloading, synchronizing, and installing.  So this approach was obviously not going to work.

Then I decided to see if I could set it up the way an end user might.  I went online and downloaded the XNA 4.0 Redistributable.  Surely this would be a simple solution, right?  Nope.  Upon launch, the installer said that it "requires at least Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile".  What the hey?  Do all Games for Windows make their customers jump through so many hoops?  Seems like that would be bad for business.  More importantly, where do I get a Client Profile, and what the heck is it anyway?

Ugh.  Exasperated.  I'm gonna take a short walk and think about this.  At least it's beautiful outside.