Stepping through the installation
On the first panel, your only option is to just click "Next." That brings you to the Software License Agreement, shown in Figure D, where you just need to accept the license terms and once again click "Next."

FIGURE D


You must accept the License Agreement in order to continue. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The next screen, Figure E, gives you the opportunity to change the default installation directory, which I rarely do, so I just clicked "Next" one more time.

FIGURE E


You probably won't change your install directory. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The next screen, Figure F, gives you the option to pick and choose the components that you want to install, which I did and then clicked on "Next."

FIGURE F


Select the components that you wish to install at this point. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The next screen, Figure G, is just a confirmation of all of the choices that have been made up to this point, so unless you made some kind of mistake and need to go back, your only option is to click on "Next" to begin the install, which I did.

FIGURE G


If everything here is correct, just click "Next" to start the install. Roll over picture for a larger image.

This brings up the progress bar shown in Figure H, and also signals a good time to go grab a sandwich or pop open your Internet browser and catch up some of my highly useful articles from back issues of WebSpherePower (they're at http://www.webspherepower.com/backissues/backissues.html).

FIGURE H


Once you get to this point, the installer goes to work, and may be busy for a while. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Finishing things up
Once the installation process successfully completed, I got the summary page illustrated in Figure I. I clicked "Finish" to close the wizard, completing the installation process.

FIGURE I


If you make it to here, everything installed successfully. Roll over picture for a larger image.

To try things out, I went to the Start Menu and select IBM WebSphere Studio -> Application Developer 5.1.2. The first thing that happens is that the workspace selection screen, depicted in Figure J, is presented so that you can select a workspace.

FIGURE J


Select your workspace before the Studio is launched. Roll over picture for a larger image.

If you want to keep this dialog box from coming up every time you start Studio, you can check on the little box labeled "Use this workspace as the default and do not show this dialog box again," but before you do, you might want to check out Senior Technical Editor Dan Velasco's November 2003 article on Managing multiple workspaces with WebSphere Studio (http://www.webspherepower.com/issues/issue200311/00001150001.html).

Once past the workspace selection process, I was greeted by the Welcome screen for your new version WebSphere Studio, shown in Figure K.

FIGURE K


This is the installed WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.1.2 initial screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

At this point, I could have gone right into installing all of various third-party Eclipse plug-ins that I use, but I think I'll nose around first and see what's different and what's still the same.

Now that it appears that everything has been installed successfully, I'm going to play around a bit before I start adding things to it, but so far it looks familiar enough that I might be moving all of my projects over rather quickly and dropping the old 5.0 version sooner than I was originally thinking.