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Visual Studio 2015 Preview Downloads
http://www.visualstudio.com/en...

Don't download. Virus inside.

Visual Studio 2015 Preview Downloads
http://www.visualstudio.com/en...

Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN is a staggering GBP 11,235.00 (nearly 18 thousand USD) and Visual Studio Premium with MSDN goes for GBP 5,169.33. I think these prices are insane.

Microsoft also just (today) announced a new edition of VS 2013, called "Community", that is free (like the old Express editions) but is "full-featured" and supports both extensions and multiple languages. In fact, it comes with support for building iOS and Android apps built in, which kind of astonished me.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between Community and Professional, aside from the present of a purchase price, is that Comm is "for non-enterprise application development". I'm not sure where something crosses the line into being an "enterprise", but I think it's quite fair to say you can write and publish mobile apps (including iOS or Android mobile apps) with this as a hobby or independent developer.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en...

Yep. The Visual Studio 2013 Community edition can be downloaded and used by anyone.

While they didn't say anything about porting VS to Linux/OSX, apparently they made the Windows VS Standard edition free today. They're calling it Visual Studio Community 2013 and it's based on Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 (which was also released today).

Of course, it's still missing the features you get in the Enterprise, Test Manager, and Ultimate editions. Heck, I don't even see support for TFS mentioned, although it does support Git...

At this time WPF isn't being ported. They are giving Xamarin a lot of press at the event, that's the current approach to mobile UI development at this time (I've been using Xamarin for over a year at this point for Android development).

They talked to this a while ago while taking Twitter questions, during the Halftime Show (go down and there's a jump link), it's about 15 minutes long.

Here's the link.
http://www.visualstudio.com/co...

All of the presentations can be seen here (it's live through this afternoon and tomorrow as well):
http://www.visualstudio.com/co...

It has some nice features related to performance monitoring, debugging (execution logging, for example), and architecture modeling (like UML). Most of the team functionality is available in the Premium version. You can see a comparison here.

For a fun exercise, tell your outsourced developer that his IDE costs more than his salary. See how he responds.

We have the intertubes, bundling is no longer needed to give something away.

You want Basic? There's VB.
You want to go deeper? Try C++

Visual Studio Express is Microsoft's zero-cash programming environment. Why do you want a high-cost office suite with a lousy macro engine to be discounted to free when they already offer their actual development suite pro bono. It's upgradeable to more complete Visual Studio versions later. This will encourage Microsoft-centric code, but that can be avoided and it's less specific of a tie-in than VBA. C#, C, C++, and more are included.

If you don't want to be tied to Microsoft-specific tools even on Windows there are other options. Those include other office suites and other actual development tools.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have OOBasic and can be scripted with Python and Java if you really want. These things are zero-cash and open source.

You can use Lazarus and FreePascal (Wikipedia article about FreePascal) or Eclipse and Java/C/C++ if you'd rather. Or you could use Eric and Python. Or Padre and Strawberry Perl, complete with MinGW. Some of the IDEs are more or less general and language agnostic, while others are mainly narrowly targeted.

Don't forget MsysGit (git for Windows) if you're not using Cygwin and haven't already chosen a version control system.

Really, you could be teaching with a good programmer's editor rather than specifically with IDEs too. vim, Emacs, jEdit, Gedit, and others are applicable. Some of them are powerful enough to make that line between editors and IDEs very fuzzy.

What, exactly, would a free copy of Word get you that isn't already available?

So...which of those titles are included with every copy of Windows?

Why does it have to come with the OS? What does that even matter these days, when everything is a download away.Almost half the products I listed are available direct from MS without going through Dreamspark:

• Robotics Studio
• XNA Game Studio
• Kinect for Windows SDK
• Kodu Game Lab
• Small Basic

Just a simple download away. You can even download Visual Studio Express for free to develop for web, desktop, or Windows Phone. This is a great place for kids to start. When they're ready for advanced features, they can move over to the full version through Dreamspark.

Which of those provide kids with a simple and powerful way to create something impressive?

Take your pick. There's something for all levels. Smallbasic and Kodu Game Lab are products for beginners. Next level up they can use Robotics studio or XNA Game Lab. Kinect SDK is very powerful and easy to use as well with lots of example code.

If Bill Gates was a teenager now, he would be on xbox live and there never would have been any Microsoft.

Many gamers are very keen to make their own games, but they don't know how. MS provides tools for this. I've taught many middle / high school students how to program robots using MS Robotics studio and the Kinect SDK, and they love it. It's amazing the kind of stuff they come up with.

Would Microsoft want to get kids hooked into nice wholesome activities like MS-SQL, C#, .net or VB

They already give away all that. Plus a restriction-free copy of Visual Studio, to boot. They have been for decades. Your FUD is decades out-of-date and I hate you.

According to this: http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-online-overview-vs "Visual Studio Online, formerly Team Foundation Service, is the home for your project data in the cloud.". So No, it is NOT an IDE.

I don't see an editor in the linked stories. In the setup instructions http://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/connect-to-vs#connectvs it says "5. Now you're ready to check in source, queue builds, and manage work." which sounds like a control panel, not an IDE. This also requires VS2013 which doesn't exactly make it "Browser-Based".

Basically they've rolled out Git support for the latest TFS Service release that means a full patch for TFS2012 & VS2012 should be out in 4 - 6 weeks.