Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Express, VS 2005 Beta

An anonymous reader writes "At the TechEd Europe keynote today, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1. With it, they also released a set of five 'Express Editions' of Visual Studio. These currently free applications offer a student and hobbyist-oriented version of Visual Studio, and are available in C#, C++, VB, Web Developer, and SQL flavors. Each download weighs in at right around 50MB and features tools, documentation, and starter kits. There's been multiple posts and more information on this announcement over at MSDN Blogs, too." Update: 06/29 13:57 GMT by S : A clarification from the Express FAQ: Although the Beta Express products are currently free to download: "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year."

Comments

Difference between this and full version

[Mourgos]

What is the difference between this and the full version of Visual Studio?

Re:Difference between this and full version

[ITman75]

usually if they release an express it is for just viewing those type of documents.

Like volo view express, it is just to view cad drawing but you can't do anything but view them.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[jeff67]

RTFFAQ

Re:Difference between this and full version

[marnargulus]

Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition enables you to create Windows Forms- and console-based applications as well as class libraries.

Visual C# 2005 Express Edition enables you to create Windows Forms- and console-based applications as well as class libraries.

Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition enables you to create Windows Forms- and console-based applications as well as class libraries.

Visual J# 2005 Express Edition enables you to create Windows Forms- and console-based applications as well as class libraries.

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is focused exclusively on Web development with ASP.NET 2.0. Choose from Visual Basic, C#, or J# languages.



They also released SQL Server 2005 Express (Very nice for web developement) which they say:
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition complements the other Express products by providing database support that is both powerful and easy to use.

So it looks like these are functional development tools, however they don't have all the extras (or dead weight to some) that the others have. I personally think this would be great for those of us who can't afford the full version on our home computers, and would still like to work on small projects.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[Timesprout]

Each download caters to a specific language, one of the coolest features is to have comprehensive support for multiple language projects in a single workspace. Seems to be editor, debugger, GUI designer. Enough to get you started. None of the nice toys like analyser, test center, visio etc come with them. Nice to see they have included refactoring though, a huge ommission from previous versions.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[mrwonton]

That raelly wouldn't apply here. You don't need any special tools to view C++ code, unless you consider a text editor a special tool.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[gorbachev]

"streamlined user interface"?? I wonder what that really means.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[mausmalone]

One difference that I'm really annoyed about is that the Express versions don't have support for 64-bit processors. Shouldn't this be a pull-down list on the projects settings menu at this point?

Re:Difference between this and full version

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new to the way MicroSoft does things.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[Seek_1]

"Express".. as in stripped-down functionality so that once your project gets to the point where you'd making money off it, you upgrade to the full edition and pay them a big pile of cash.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[catherder_finleyd]

Actually, as those things go, the full version Visual Studio is not all that expensive. For example, Microsoft's price for the highest-end version, "Visual Studio Enterprise Architect" is $2499.00. For $300 more ($2799) you can get "MSDN Universal" which has almost "everything" Microsoft makes. Borland's JBuilder X Enterprise is priced at $3500.

If you don't want to pay so much, you can look around online and find some very good bargains. "MSDN Universal" can be found for around $1000 - 1500, or $700 - 900 for academic users.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[Woody77]

Which version of VS actually has those tools? My "Professional" version certainly didn't.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Architect Über-Premium Extra Crispy Platinum Millennium Lo-Carb Edition.

Re:Difference between this and full version

[metasyntactic]

Timesprout:

You can get this level of support from the Standard/Professional/Enterprise SKUs. The new tools will be part of the Visual Studio Team System release.

I'm glad to see your interest in the refactorings. It would be incredibly helpful if you could try them out and send us feedback

You might want to chack out LadyBug where you can post feeback and bugs and have the community vote on them.

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

Re:Difference between this and full version

[mattgreen]

Does refactoring support unmanaged C++?

That's cool

[WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWX]

It's good to see Microsoft trying to get on board with at least the spirit of Open Source.

Re:That's cool

[OptimizedPrime]

No, this may be free as in beer, but they are definitly not meeting the "free" spirit of Open Source. It looks like you can't make commercial products with these, which is certainly not free/open

Re:That's cool

[mopslik]

It's good to see Microsoft trying to get on board with at least the spirit of Open Source.

Except that it's not Open Source, just free (as in price) software. Sure to raise some hackles around here.

Re:That's cool

[Doomrat]

It's good to see Microsoft trying to get on board with at least the spirit of Open Source.

You seem to think that anything free has to compete with your beloved Open Source paradigm. You'd be helping the project a lot more if you didn't zealously compare anything free with it. You're just exercising a negative stereotype about the typical geek.

Re:That's cool

[melgeroth]

The spirit of open source, not free software. They are attempting to fight fire with fire, and in the eyes of the common man they are. But this != "free" (libre).

Re:That's cool

[Murf_E]

Actually its not free at all M$ says they will release prices next calendar year and they will be "low-cost"

Re:That's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Spirit of "warez", you mean. Very, very, very different.

Re:That's cool

[jeff67]

It's not free in any sense of the word.

a. It's BETA, meaning not done and unsupported, not free
b. "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire."
c. as previously stated, there is no permission for distributing apps built with it

Re:That's cool

[LWATCDR]

Actually this is a move to knock out DevC++, gcc, Eclipse, and Netbeans.
The more you get people to use "windows only" solutions the better microsoft feels.
They know it is all about the developers and want to lock them down as hard and as fast they can.

Hello how about Evolution for Windows to compete with Outlook?

Re:That's cool

[computational super]

It looks like you can't make commercial products with these

Where did you see this? I looked all over the site (since I suspected this would be the "catch") and never found this issue addressed positively or negatively. I sort of suspected that these tools would be tied to some "special" version of the C standard library or something that has some legalese licensing restriction on redistribution.

Re:That's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Try making a commercial (closed-source) product with libraries licensed under the GPL. That's not legal, either.

Re:That's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

"c. as previously stated, there is no permission for distributing apps built with it"

You can distrubute tables you built with a hammer without a permission from the store that sold you the hammer.

Re:That's cool

[SilentChris]

So, um, with Friendster, that's been "beta" up until now, but plans on eventually charging for services (read articles about the founder), what's currently there isn't "free"?

Re:That's cool

[jeff67]

Not if the hammer's EULA restricts it.

Re:That's cool

[OptimizedPrime]

From the FAQ Can I build and deploy applications using the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta 1? No. During the Beta 1 timeframe we want customers to experiment, evaluate and learn with the tool, but sites cannot be used for any public or production purposes. At Beta 2 Microsoft will likely provide a "Go-live license" that will enable developers to put sites into production.

Re:That's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

commercial != closed-source

Re:That's cool

[dasmegabyte]

That's okay. Apparently, you can't make all that much money off Open Source products, either.

Re:That's cool

[chris_mahan]

>>...low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire.

how low-cost? Low cost for poor people in india type of low cost? Low cost for deployment in the third world-low cost?
If it's more than $1, it ain't low cost no more.

>>Easy to aquire?
As easy as logging in to world-wide mirrored ftp archive with anon username?
That easy?

Besides, I see "Express" in the name and shudder. FrontPage Express, Outlook Express, Yuck!!!

Re:That's cool

[EvanED]

Yes it is. You can certainly sell GPL'd products.

Of course, it's also legal for someone else to buy it then distribute it for free themselves...

Re:That's cool

[frankrachel]

But you can't distribute Templates/Jigs you create with the TemplateMaster tool...
EULA For TemplateMaster

Re:That's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if Mono blew out their "Windows only" idea. AFAIK, they even want to do a VB.NET runtime.

Imagine: VB programs on... Linux?

I hope they're successful with that. It would be really amusing. Plus, it might mean we can run the next generation of Windows programs almost effortlessly.

Of course, yes, they are playing catchup with an API... But if you think about it... It's probably easier to clone an OO API, especially one where methods are explicitly marked public/private/etc and prototyped in the object file, than a bunch of C libraries with undocumented features and sometimes unexported symbols that some applications "use anyway".

Microsoft does have patents on some of the .NET stuff, but I guess for the mono people, it's a risk they're willing to take.

Re:That's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting that ESR clearly makes known his feelings on calling Open Source Free Software, but it is interesting to note that the above Poster makes no mention of Free Software (and in fact refers to it as Open Source) yet has tacked on the free as in beer connotation. One might argue that this is still a result of calling Open software Free (as RMS does) but ultimately, I don't think it matters. People will still connect Open Source or Free as in Freedom with zero cost because in fact, they are both zero cost. I think this will always be the case as a zero cost price tag is always going to take precedence in the minds of end user land, and any concept that has deeper roots will take the back seat in the minds of consumers everywhere. So much of the Open Source movement is discussed by developers, as they are the architects behind the whole thing. But seldom is this subject examined from a pure end user perspective. And if it is, it is not elaborated upon in public in a fashion that end users can find relevance in. Which makes me wonder if userland will ever get the idea, and if it matters if they do. I think perhpas it does not matter if they do. Ideally, we hope they will. But, in fact, this might be a side benefit if you will, or a fruit that is obtained, but is not the point. Then again, I myself am a end user so perhaps I am wrong.

Re:That's cool

[msh104]

Read Again, he said "closed-source"

Re:That's cool

[chochos]

Actually it's not even really free-as-in-beer... the betas are free, but the license states that you can't use them to make a production application. And when the final versions come out, they will have a price tag. Supposedly cheap, but definitely not free in any sense of the word.

Re:That's cool

[EvanED]

Oops.

I must slow down... make too many mistakes from skimming.

Re:That's cool

[1010011010]

Apple seems to.

Re:That's cool

[rp8774]

This seems to suggest that Beta 1 won't let you deploy apps because the functionality isn't all there yet, but Beta 2 will.

Re:That's cool

[KarmaMB84]

Apple makes money off the proprietary shell on top of the OSS software and the proprietary equipment it's all running on.

Re:That's cool

[1010011010]

... in other words, they make money from FOSS.

Re:That's cool

[jmccay]

It won't knock out anything. Prevoius "student releases" have had outragous licensing scheme. The version the distribute with books has a clause that specifically says you cannot distribute anything you compile with the compiler.

Dev C++ is a great IDE, but it still has a little more to do before it can compete with VS. I am not holding my breath about this release. Especially considering the you do not know what the license will be.

Re:That's cool

[Javagator]

You could develop the source code with the beta and then compile it with the current free production compiler. IANALBISAAHIELN but this would seem legal to me.

Re:That's cool

[TomV]

If you know the Base Class Library well enough to carefully avoid any Framework 2.0 features, and the language you choose well enough to avoid using, for example, Generics in C#/VB.net, you might be able to use the new Express IDEs to write code that would compile with the 1.0 or 1.1 compilers. You'd have to tweak the manifests to target the 1.0 or 1.1 framework before compiling as well. The compiler would be a lesser issue in terms of legal distribution compared to the Framework, ISTM.

It might just work, but it seems rather a faff. If you're looking to use C# price-free with an IDE, SharpDevelop seems like a better option for now. Or, for web apps, there's a thing called Web Matrix available at asp.net which is price-free and fits on a floppy, if you remember those things.

Sweet!

[Pxtl]

Say what you will about MS, but Visual Studio has always been an excellent product. Nice debugger, and VB is an excellent RAD language (particularly the GUI-drawing system).

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found their build system to be nightmarish, but maybe that's just me.

Re:Sweet!

[melgeroth]

Not really. From what i've seen (C++ only really), they have the word optimization routines of any compiler. I agree though that VB is the best RAD language i've seen (though I hear good things about delphi as well).

Re:Sweet!

[revin]

I totally agree... as I am into java-web-coding I was always a bit of jealous on that gui drawing system. I'm glad Sun had a good look to it while building Java Studio Creator (http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/jscreator/)
where you can use the java server faces (JSF)framework to nicely draw your work.

Re:Sweet!

[ConceptJunkie]

I gotta agree with you. As a Windows developer, I am infuriated on an almost daily basis by Microsoft, but I have to say I actually enjoy using Visual Studio. It's reasonably simple (if you ignore the next-to-useless, pseudo-CASE tools), flexible enough to let you do what you need, and it works... I've been using VS6 for about 5 or 6 years and it's solid as a rock. I'd like to upgrade, but the project I'm using is staying with VS6 for now.

I will say I have no interest in .NET, "managed code" and all the other well-meaning but ultimately frightening things that they are doing to the tools. I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools. My philosophy with MS development has always been, the development environment is great, the libraries suck.

Re:Sweet!

[XMyth]

True. They have begun to address that though. They've included a Nant like build system called "msbuild". They're also releasing a new (and supposedly greatly improved) version of the disgrace that is Visual SourceSafe.

Re:Sweet!

[110010001000]

Actually, MSVC++ has the best optimization of any x86 compiler. It certainly blows away gcc/egcs.

Re:Sweet!

[N0decam]

My philosophy with MS development has always been, the development environment is great, the libraries suck.

All the more reason to check out .Net - the dev environment is a vast improvement, and the libraries don't suck as much. (Actually I think that they don't suck at all, but I'm sure that as with any product, there are problems that I haven't encountered yet.)

Say what you will about MS, they know how to cater to developers - to lure them over to the "Dark Side."

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't seen RAD if you haven't seen Delphi :-). VB pioneered (VBX->ActiveX) and Delphi (VCL/ActiveX) excelled in component based programming.

Re:Sweet!

[XMyth]

You really should look into .NET. It's not Microsoft's trend of the week....it is definately the New Way Of Doing Things (tm) in the Windows world. I could go into more evidence of this, but you'd be better of researching it yourself.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

>I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools.

Erm - and when exactly have they done this since the advent of .NET ?

Re:Sweet!

[the chao goes mu]

My one complaint with VB is that every other english word is a reserved word. All the variables I use to store state in C programs is a VB reserved word. I end up having to tack on extra characters just to get around this "IT X_DONE" and so on...

Re:Sweet!

[the chao goes mu]

TYPO:

s/IT X_DONE/IF X_DONE/

Re:Sweet!

[Dixie_Flatline]

I found VS6 to be better than VS.Net. VS.Net 2004 is better than the first version.

I still don't use it for anything except debugging (which VS.Net 2004 is EXCELLENT at). I use emacs, since the editor of VS isn't flexible enough to give me the functionality that I'm used to from emacs.

Frankly, VS just isn't stable enough. I have it crash several times a week for no reason, the intellisense stuff is too expensive sometimes causing VS to hang for several seconds while I try to SCROLL TEXT (something that should NEVER be slow, especially on a dual processor 1800+ MP), and it's source control integration sometimes doesn't work very well (with Visual Source Safe, which is a whole different set of problems.) At best, I'd call it a mediocre complete environment, with a really fantastic debugger.

Re:Sweet!

[the chao goes mu]

TYPO MARK II:

s/All the variables I use to store state in C programs is/Every variable I use to store state in a C program is/

Re:Sweet!

[yohan1701]

I agree though that VB is the best RAD language i've seen

Have you used VB! Sure you can create an app with few textboxes and a couple of button quickly. But if it actually has do something it quickly becomes bloated and you our showing and hiding forms and knee deep into win32 api calls and ... gah! the horror!

Sorry VB flashbacks.

Re:Sweet!

[DrXym]

DevStudio is fairly good and certainly better than anything on Linux for C++ work but I wouldn't call it excellent.

Particularly for .NET development, it is missing many features that have been standard in Java IDEs such as JBuilder or Eclipse for some time. For example the ability to debug two apps at once (for client / server etc.), or to rename a class and all references to it throughout a file. Not to mention it's biggest flaw - DevStudio is intractably bound to developing apps that run with MS technology.

But even for Windows work, by far and away the most annoying 'feature' of DevStudio is the retarded context sensitive help. I've lost count of the number of times that I've hit F1 over something in a Win32 C++ project to be taken to a help page for Windows CE. I'm not sure what context it seems to be using, but it has nothing to do with what I'm doing.

Still, it's clear from these 'express' editions that MS is worried by the number of free alternative IDEs that are springing up - in particular Eclipse. After all, if students learn to programme using Eclipse, it means MS is completely frozen out the picture. After all Eclipse is primarily for developing Java apps (bad for .NET) and is cross-platform (bad for Windows). A few years down the line those students will be driving the market and a huge slice of potential MS revenue flies out the window.

Re:Sweet!

[selfsealingstembolt]

VS6 was excellent, yes. But since the .NET series started, VS really sucks. At least for the non-managed-code, non-.NET c++-developer (as I am).

The debugger tends to get worthless with any project/solution more complex than the average "hello world!" program. The UI has lots of bugs(The "Watch" windows do not open sometimes when debugging, does anybody else experience that?). Having 2 instances of VS.NET open makes both instable.

Somehow I get the feeling, they are trying to force everybody to use C# and .NET by making VS unusable for all other purposes.

Another problem is their update policy. With VS6, there were service packs and pathches available, with .NET you have to buy a newer version.
No free updates/bugfixes any more. At least none I could find on their homepage.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're full of shit!

Re:Sweet!

[ckaminski]

I have to agree. If all you are doing is talking to an Access or SQL database and building forms, VB is perfect. Anything outside this regime, and you spend more time reinventing the wheel. And if you don't have a database backing you up, you spend a LOT of time reimplementing basic data structures, like multi-dimensional arrays, hashmaps, lists, etc.

I like it because ADO and VbScript (ASP) allow me to create business applications quickly and reliably. But I hate it because I spend a lot of time reimplementing things, or working around a broken include system.

Re:Sweet!

[Decaff]

Visual Studio is an adequate development system, but could have been so much better. In the 80s, Gates was introduced to some really powerful IDEs, such as Digital Smalltalk. He even commented "This is the future". Instead of providing an IDE with dynamic layouts, cross-platform support, multi-processing, the ability to break into an app, re-compile bits and resume, true object-orientation with inheritance, and with the full source code of the IDE and the ability to extend the IDE (this is Smalltalk), we got Visual Basic and Visual Studio. It could, and should, have been so much better.

Visual Basic is a quick-fix language, but left in the hand of an inexpert developer can lead to a buggy unsupportable mess (I have had clean up plenty of such messes). Something like Object Pascal would have been far better, with good type safety, yet high speed, and with true object orientation, not the crippled version of VB6.

Re:Sweet!

[omicronish]

I will say I have no interest in .NET, "managed code" and all the other well-meaning but ultimately frightening things that they are doing to the tools. I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools. My philosophy with MS development has always been, the development environment is great, the libraries suck.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that managed code, even if you don't intend on using it in the future, is Microsoft's future. They're doing an unbelievable amount of new work in it, and if the documentation sucks now, I'm sure it'll improve in the future primarily because Microsoft's own developers will need it.

I've used OLE in the past (although I'm admittedly not very experienced with it), and although managed code may be OLE reloaded, it's definitely a step above OLE. If you haven't written managed code yet, give it a try. Aside from a few minor issues, I've been blown away by it all, and this is over a year after I first started trying it.

Re:Sweet!

[bored]

You really should look into .NET. It's not Microsoft's trend of the week....it is definately the New Way Of Doing Things (tm) in the Windows world. I could go into more evidence of this, but you'd be better of researching it yourself.

Personally, i've heard diffrent. In fact right now .NET doesn't run on any of the 64-bit windows platforms. So, basically if you wrote your app using .net, your screwed if your customer is trying to beta test 64-bit windows. I've accually heard of a number of large companies that jumped on the .net bandwagon a couple years ago, have sense bailed. For assorted reasons. I know a _LOT_ of people are dumping their VS .NET/2003 enviroments for VS 6.0.

Re:Sweet!

[Desval]

With my first experience with VS (2004 beta I believe), I felt I was taking several LARGE steps backwards. Up until then, most of my Windows dev work was with Delphi. VS felt sluggish, flakey and it was difficult to do things that were quite simple in Borland's IDE. Granted, alot of this was caused by limitations in the stock .NET framework components when compared to native VCL ones (What? Not even an Alighment property? GAH!).

I still don't know why it always seemed like VS's form designer was always a few pixels behind my mouse (2.4 GHz machine). Made me feel drunk and nauseous. As for RAD, VB just doesn't compare with Delphi. The flexibility and power of C++ with the ease of VB. I always found it way to easy to end up bashing my head against VB's limitations.

For a simple 'put some controls on a form app', VS worked out ok, but it showed serious weekness when managing more complex projects. It could handle them, but it didn't make it easy.

Microsoft created a pretty decent language with C# by hiring Delphi's cheif architect, so now maybe they should also grab up Borland's IDE team while they're at it and get rid of some of VS's braindeadedness.

If my day job didn't require me to sometimes code for Windows, all of this would be moot. VI and GCC for me all the way.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Alot of time reinventing the wheel? My company just deployed a custom firewall that uses a VB GUI. That same product written 100% in C++ would have taken MONTHS longer to develop, instead we just had to write a simple driver. Get your facts straight. VB is a very popular language, and you can do almost EVERYTHING in it you can do in C++.

Re:Sweet!

[Xentax]

There's a new version of Source Safe, and a *different* source control solution for the enterprise, code-named Hatteras. The thinking is this:

Team size 5: Hatteras.

Xentax

Re:Sweet!

[Xentax]

AFAIK, VS 2005 should run on XP 64 in compat mode, and will *compile* for AMD64 and IA-64.

Xentax

Re:Sweet!

[red floyd]

VC 6 has tons of template problems. VC7.1 is much more standards compliant. Only reason to upgrade, since the VC6 environment is much better IMO.

Re:Sweet!

[XMyth]

The latest version of the CLR brings 64bit compatability. As for companies jumping ship, I've heard some of both (jumping on and off that is)...but neither of what your or I hear is really valid as far as looking at the entire landscape.....only time will tell.

Re:Sweet!

[fijimf]

I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Java apps for about the past two years, and just recently started doing C#/.NET.

I found VS.Net usable, but pretty unimpressive. The ReSharper Add-in from IntelliJ makes it a little more pleasant, But I think it could come a long way.

In fairness to VS.Net, comparing it to IDEA is rough. IntelliJ IDEA is possibly the best piece of application software I've ever used. (In my limited experience Mathematica is it's only competition, in terms of astonishing, but never surprising behaviour.) In IDE's, Eclipse is pretty good, especially at the price, but feels about one major release behind IDEA.

Re:Sweet!

[RupW]

I will say I have no interest in .NET, "managed code" and all the other well-meaning but ultimately frightening things that they are doing to the tools.

Yeah, I used to feel that way. I've still never used it for a GUI - prefer C++/MFC - but it feels absolutely natural for server side in ASP.NET. And if you're just in it for C++/MFC then there are some nice new touches in VS.NET's updated MFC and ATL. I haven't looked at the 2005 MFC, though.

Re:Sweet!

[MaestroSartori]

I didn't want to mod you down for this, so thought I'd post separately:

DevStudio is intractably bound to developing apps that run with MS technology.

Wrong. I'm currently (as in I've alt-tabbed over from it to post this) using it to develop for PS2, using the SN Systems gcc-based toolchain and makefiles. It is trivial to use plug-in compilers, debuggers etc. with VS6 and VS.Net. May not be trivial to write them or interface them, but I didn't get the impression that that was what you meant...

Re:Sweet!

[TummyX]

For example the ability to debug two apps at once (for client / server etc.)


what's wrong with running two instances of dev studio?

Re:Sweet!

[Malc]

I'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed by this feature of the MSDN library! I explicitly didn't install the Windows CE related stuff... all it does now is prompt for the installation disk to load those pages. Grrr. Filtering isn't as easy as it used to be either.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily debug multiple applications at the same time, all you need to do is right click on the second (third, etc) project and select 'Start New Instance.'

Visual Studio 2005 does support class renaming and a host of other refactoring options. However for now I use a $200 add-on from Borland (Together for Visual Studio) that provides very good refactoring support.

-!!!

Re:Sweet!

[justins]

the ability to break into an app, re-compile bits and resume

Is present in Visual C++, and has been for a while.

Re:Sweet!

[ConceptJunkie]

Here's the question I have, and no I haven't done a lot of research into .NET. But with MFC, a simple FTP program or HTTP page tearer took several hundred lines of code. I can write similar programs with my tools in a dozen lines or so. I bet Linux programmers can do better. I have yet to see a Microsoft coding technology that didn't require you to copy and paste large swaths of "cookbook" code to make anything work and then struggle like crazy to make it do something different than the demos, usually due to lack of meaningful documentation. And if you make a mistake like mismatching your releases, you might as well get Madame Zorba to find the problem reading tea leaves. Real tools do work for you, Microsoft tools make you work for them.

If this isn't true for .NET then maybe it's worth checking out.

Re:Sweet!

[Decaff]

Is present in Visual C++, and has been for a while.

But it's not a general Visual Studio thing, which was what was being discussed. Using VB6, you often come across situations where a message appears that what you are about to do will interrupt the debugging and stop the program. This is so unnecessary. IDEs and languages have been doing better than this for decades. Why do developers expect so little?

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I need to respond to this because these posts are really getting ridiculous and stupid and contain just pure FUD.

"Instead of providing an IDE with dynamic layouts, cross-platform support, multi-processing, the ability to break into an app, re-compile bits and resume, true object-orientation with inheritance, and with the full source code of the IDE and the ability to extend the IDE"

"Dynamic Layouts" - Uh, yes this is in Visual Studio
"Cross Platform Support" - Uh, yes, if you are talking about non-x86 support. Of course it doesn't run on non-Windows platforms. I don't think that makes much sense to create a Windows dev environment that RUNS ON OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS!!!
"Multi-processing" - Er, what? This makes no sense. If you mean support for multiprocessing in the compilers, or the ability to assign seperate compiles to different processors, then this is supported
"The ability to break into an app" - Er, yeah. Um, thats in there. Its in the the debug menu: Attach to process.
"re-compile bits and resume" - Er, yeah. Its been in since VS 5.0.
"true object-orientation with inheritance" - Um, that would be a feature of the language, not the development environment. Clueless.
"the ability to extend the IDE" - Er, yeah. You can do this. This is why so many companies sell VS addins to the IDE.

I mean really, why do people bother posting FUD? Is it for the karma, or are they really clueless?

And he was modded +3 insightful, while I am prevented from posting from my account due to my non-slashborg oriented posts. Shameful.

Re:Sweet!

[Saige]

For example the ability to [...] rename a class and all references to it throughout a file.

Taken care of in VS2005 - and it'll actually rename throughout an entire project. There are a lot of features along these lines that have been added in, which I've been grateful for these past couple months when I've been using it.

Re:Sweet!

[jhurani]

I've faced these so...

missing many features [...] For example the ability to debug two apps at once

Visual Studio .NET 7.1 aka 2003 allows that. Go to Tools -> Debug Processes.

F1 over something in a Win32 C++ project to be taken to a help page for Windows CE.

Set filters in MSDN or uninstall that particular topic from MSDN.

Re:Sweet!

[amliebsch]

Using the Net.Sockets library, specifically the TCPClient base class, you could probably write the code to do FTP transactions in about ten lines. Consuming an http page, probably five lines.

Even in VB!

Re:Sweet!

[Decaff]

"Dynamic Layouts" - Uh, yes this is in Visual Studio

The drag-and-drop pixel-positioning of Visual Studio form design? OK, so you can in principle do better, but most don't.

"Cross Platform Support" - Uh, yes, if you are talking about non-x86 support. Of course it doesn't run on non-Windows platforms. I don't think that makes much sense to create a Windows dev environment that RUNS ON OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS!!!

(no need to shout!) Why not? There are Windows CE development environments that run on Windows 2000.

The fact is, cross-platform and full-featured IDEs were available decades ago.

"Multi-processing" - Er, what? This makes no sense. If you mean support for multiprocessing in the compilers, or the ability to assign seperate compiles to different processors, then this is supported.

No: I mean a full featured multi-processing language and IDE combination that allows launching of several apps and processes at once, with the ability to follow individual processes, interrupt and resume them.

"The ability to break into an app" - Er, yeah. Um, thats in there. Its in the the debug menu: Attach to process.

And then compile and resume.

"re-compile bits and resume" - Er, yeah. Its been in since VS 5.0.

Its not there. If you have ever tried to deal with run-time bugs in VB6, you are regularly presented with a message that if you proceed with further edits, you will terminate the program. That really is not true compile and resume. Its poor a third-rate substitute. Remember, other languages and IDEs have been doing better than this for decades, so why not Visual Studio? It may be better in VS.Net?

"true object-orientation with inheritance" - Um, that would be a feature of the language, not the development environment. Clueless.

Not clueless, as in Smalltalk (which was the example I presented), the language and development system are one. The separation of language and IDE is arbitrary, and unecessary, as any Smalltalker or LISPer will tell you. Its so primitive.

"the ability to extend the IDE" - Er, yeah. You can do this. This is why so many companies sell VS addins to the IDE.

This is one of my real dislikes of Visual Studio. My impression (I could be wrong) was that it was designed partly as a way to set up a component and extension market for the IDE, not to allow developers to easily extend the IDE themselves. It took years before you could even write components in the main target language of Visual Studio itself: VB. In Smalltalk, you can adapt the debugger if you like, add new features to the process management, do all kinds of things, and then use those in your deployed application. There was a thriving market for home-grown extensions to Digitalk (and other) Smalltalk IDEs in the 80s and early 90s. These could be nothing more than the addition of a few useful menu items, but it was easy and trivial to do. Visual Studio (and many other popular IDEs) restrict freedom.

I mean really, why do people bother posting FUD? Is it for the karma, or are they really clueless?

You may disagree with what I say, and that is fine, but I don't see how it can be labelled either Fear, Uncertainty or Doubt. Its simply a critical comparison of IDEs, and as the Smalltalk market is very small, and I'm certainly not going to do Visual Studio sales any harm(!) I really don't see what the problem is.

Re:Sweet!

[Chester K]

I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools.

You'd be very hard pressed to find someone who uses .NET that would say it was "incomprehensible" and "poorly documented". .NET is not a rebranding of OLE or COM; it's a new object model that happens to, through a seperate interop process, have backward support for OLE and COM.

Re:Sweet!

[RevAaron]

particularly the GUI-drawing system

From my experience, this is the most commonly sited perk of VB. It's something that you've been able to do for darn near any language for a long time- GUI designers really aren't new, and VB doesn't even have the best one available.

The frequency that I see people cite the GUI designer as the major benefit to VB makes me think that most folks- especially the types of people on /.- seem to be stuck in the past, coding all of their GUIs manually. I know that the development setup is generally some years behind for most Linux developers compared to your average coder on Windows or Mac OS X, and that there are fewer good and polished tools on Linux. But still- there are free GUI designers for GTK+, FLTK, Qt and Motif. And for just about any other toolkit and language. Do people not use these?

That said, tools like VB and RealBasic (with which I've more experience than VB) are RADs for more than just a GUI designer. Using Glade for a C/GTK+ app won't make you as productive as a seasoned VB coder for simple app development, but it will shave off some time spent coding the GUI programatically.

But there are options, and some darn good ones on, for Linux:

Prima: a new GUI toolkit for perl- including a really nice RAD GUI builder- for Linux, OS/2 and Windows.

Squeak Smalltalk: Runs on just about every platform. Uses a seperate GUI toolkit, but affords a huge amount of power and ease of development.

RealBasic: A cross-platform VB clone for Mac OS Classic/X, Windows and Linux. *Really* nice. Costs money, but it's worth it.

RunTime Revolution: Has a HyperTalk-like language and runs almost anywhere. ...and others. But those are some that embody the feeling of a RAD IDE like VB. That is, they do more than just add a GUI designer.

Re:Sweet!

[DrXym]

Quite a bit. It means having separate projects for client & server (since DevStudio complains of locked files if you load the same project twice), it means hopping from window to window, it means you have set breakpoints twice if you're debugging common code, it means bouncing from window to window to debug, it means opening another DevStudio for every process you want to debug (e.g. to isolate a race condition with multiple clients).

Re:Sweet!

[Slime-dogg]

With .NET tools (Mono or MS), System.Net provides nearly everything you could ever want. There's an implementation of sockets that is extremely easy to use, both for Unix style sockets and Winsock. There is an http handler that can be inherited from and extended, as well as DNS resolvers, Authentication classes, UDP, IPV6, etc.

To use any of them, you have to include it as a reference if it isn't in the core library (System.Net is). Put "using System.Net" at the top, and have a bunch of fun with it.

Re:Sweet!

[Barlo_Mung_42]

We would like to use .net for our user mode applications but we still need to support preXP SP1 systems. The .net runtime is around 23MBs to download and that's just too large.
And of coarse .net can't be used for driver development so our dev environment would be even more mixed.

Re:Sweet!

[XMyth]

True... .NET isn't as pervasive as us .NET developers would like it. But where it truly shines so far is in in-house corporate apps and web development. ASP.NET is just freaking awesome. And for corporate apps, rolling out the .NET runtime to all clients isn't a big deal most the time.

Re:Sweet!

[Decaff]

I would assume that your smalltalk ide couldn't handle every case of edit-and-continue.

It can, and I do mean every case. The whole Smalltalk environment is a continuous series of executing processes, of which your 'application' is just one.

You guys need to give up looking down your noses at anyone who uses anything but (LISP/Smalltalk/insert other escoteric language here.)

I don't look down at other languages - in fact, I don't do Smalltalk development these days.

There is a reason all those languages have not been popular. They really don't address real world development issues.

Actually, Smalltalk was widely used at the end of the 80s, and still is used for real world development. For a time, it was touch-and-go whether Smalltalk or C++ would be the primary OO development language. Its a highly practical language for many situations, and is certainly not elitist. Unfortunately, the Smalltalk industry seemed to decide that high-pricing, awkward licencing, and forking the language was more important than widespread use, so it almost died out. Its better today, with good free implementations, like Squeak.

People use Microsoft development environments for a reason. It is because the complete package is there: an excellent dev environment, excellent help and online support, an installation system, top notch compilers and wide industry use.

Yes, I agree, these are good features of it, but I still feel strongly that people who don't have experience of something 'elitist' like Smalltalk at its best are not in a position to judge what is missing from something like Visual Studio. They think what they have is first-rate. Its good, but not that good.

Things are getting better, in terms of IDEs - IBMs VisualAge range was superb (after all, it was written in Smalltalk!), and Eclipse with its ability to execute and debug arbitrary code fragments is looking good, but they still aren't up to what many of us used years ago in terms of power and flexibility. At least, that's what I feel.

Re:Sweet!

[metasyntactic]

DrXym:

Visual Studio is able to debug multiple applications at the same time. C# and VB now have the "Rename" refactoring. Note: C# is not bound to MS technology. It's bound to ECMA standards. You can take what you develop in C# and run in on Mono or DotGnu, or vice versa

I've sent your feedback on the help system to the UE team. You might also want to check out LadyBug where you can post feeback and bugs and have the community vote on them.

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

Re:Sweet!

[Kindaian]

I hate when i try to check what a method does and see an example of it's several sintaxes (as i used to do with VS6) just to get an "automated" doc stating what i already know... the method parameters...

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

What does ASP.NET offer that JSP doesn't?

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, ASP.Net (1.1) is too locked into itself. It is based on the assumption that ALL form submits will be back to the server, and not to an external server. Why does this suck? Well, what if you're trying to wrap a form up in an XML Signature, which is simple enough to do in ASP.Net, to send to a separate server (say, it's an Intranet form going to a 3rd-party service host)?

Sure, you dont have to use a tag, but then what is the point of using ASP.Net, then?
Good luck. yes, it's doable, but it's *OBSCURE*.

Re:Sweet!

[Stormie]

Wrong. I'm currently (as in I've alt-tabbed over from it to post this) using it to develop for PS2

Ditto, I've also developed for PS2 and Gamecube using Visual Studio. Since we were also doing a Windows/DirectX and an Xbox version, it seemed easier to use the same editor environment for all 4 versions, with the MS compiler for the MS platforms, and the SN Systems gcc-based compiler for the PS2 and GC.

Re:Sweet!

[infinidim]

You can extend the VS IDE, the ActiveState guys have a great Perl add-in which has intellisense and all new Perl project wizards.

Check it out

Re:Sweet!

[Decaff]

You can extend the VS IDE, the ActiveState guys have a great Perl add-in which has intellisense and all new Perl project wizards.

What I meant was that the IDE should be open for casual developers to extend quickly and easily in the language they normal work in. It would have been great if, when VS was first introduced, you could easily add extensions to it in Visual Basic. Suppose you wanted to add an Edit menu item that linked to code to, for example, reformat your source. In the Smalltalk system, this is not only trivial, its expected practice, and a normal way to work. Visual Studio imposes a separation between the IDE extenders and component providers, and the casual developer. I think this is an arbitrary and unnecessary division. The thing is, its a fact of history that Gates saw and took an interest in IDEs that gave this kind of power to every developer, but when MS released Visual Studio it was (and still is to some extent) restrictive on what you can do and use. The big question is why?

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

# vi file.cpp
# make
# ./program

repeat.
vc is garbage, vb is a pile of ... it's really that simple.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

That realbasic thing looked interesting until I went to the web page. It looks like they're kind of avoiding the fact that there is no IDE for Linux. You can only compile apps that will run.

Pointless for those who don't run windows or OSX, isn't it?

Re:Sweet!

[omicronish]

Instead of providing an IDE with dynamic layouts, cross-platform support, multi-processing, the ability to break into an app, re-compile bits and resume, true object-orientation with inheritance, and with the full source code of the IDE and the ability to extend the IDE (this is Smalltalk), we got Visual Basic and Visual Studio.

VC++ and I think C# both support Edit-and-Continue, which allows you to make a change in the middle of debugging and resume debugging without restarting the program.

Something like Object Pascal would have been far better, with good type safety, yet high speed, and with true object orientation, not the crippled version of VB6.

I agree that VB6 was probably a crappy language, but that's fixed with VB.NET. It is type-safe and is truly object-oriented. I haven't seen performance numbers, but since it is a managed language like C#, I assume performance is similar.

Re:Sweet!

[buzzcutbuddha]

Your sig says "Closed Track", perhaps it should say "Closed Mind" instead.

Here's a link from O'Reilly on how to write an FTP Client in .Net:

http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2004/05/10/ ft pdotnet.htm .Net is probably one of the best things that Microsoft has ever done, all the more so, considering the runtime is free and most clients will have it.

The documentation is profuse, clear, and comprehensive. There are very few things that don't exist that probably should when you go looking for them, but enough people have hunted for the same thing and have already crossed those hurdles for you. This means you get to spend more time focusing on getting the app to solve the real business problems you should be focusing on and less trying to mold it to do the basics of what you need.

Re:Sweet!

[aztracker1]

I'd suggest you get a book on VB.Net then, or take the plung into C#.. they include a lot of data modeling tools for arrays/hashtables, etc...

Re:Sweet!

[aztracker1]

.Net is a revised structure... essentially, laying out most things in a pretty logical, organized, and usable structure... "Managed Code" allows for an application to run in a protected environment... meaning a poorly designed application is less likely to bring down portions of the gui, or os with it...

It isn't the same beast (though underpinnings are similar, and in some cases map to the winAPI). Longhorn will likely change the underpinnings leaving .net apps to run from the same code, and older windows apps to be either emulated, or isolated differently.

Re:Sweet!

[aztracker1]

I use crimson for all my editing, .net/asp.net (C#, vb, jscript), c#/standalone, html, php, sql, javascript, you name it.. works great.

However, having seen a preview of the 2005 a few weeks ago, it's *REALLY* compelling to leave a lot of hand-coding behind...

Re:Sweet!

[rhinoX]

If you use edit-and-continue in anything other than VB, you sir, are crazy.

In C++ it's just asking for trouble and in c# it barely works correctly. It's easier and safer to just kill the app and start over. However, in VB it seems to work pretty well. I especially like the immediate window.

Re:Sweet!

[justins]

In C++ it's just asking for trouble

"It works on my machine." :)

feeding the addiction

[bumperbanana]

This is another example of trying to get people hooked into their products... now if only Linux was available in stripped down cheap versions the world would be a better place *confused*

Re:feeding the addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is available in stripped down cheap versions.

Re:feeding the addiction

[jeff67]

It is, and they are not pretending it is not:
"Microsoft is committed to helping you "graduate" to higher-end products "

Re:feeding the addiction

[zhiwenchong]

I'm assuming the Visual Studio Express suite comprises IDEs for .NET, since that's the direction Microsoft is going, big time.

There are actually two free .NET IDEs out there at moment (with caveats, of course): SharpDevelop (GPL, with GUI builder) and Borland's C# Builder Personal Editioin NON-Commercial (you can only make non-commercial apps with this).

Re:feeding the addiction

[zurab]

(you can only make non-commercial apps with this)

Notice to consumer:

Thank you for purchasing a BladeIP Starter Edition knife with the IP-Track technology! This knife contains BladeIP Intellectual Property including numerous U.S. and international patents, trade secrets, and copyrighted aspects of its design.

BladeIP hereby grants you a one-time, non-exclusive, non-transferrable, revocable license to use this knife for non-commercial purposes within its "acceptable use." Acceptable use for this knife under this license is limited to peeling fruits in one single-family home defined as a primary residence. The license does not permit using the knife outside of the licensor's primary residence including but not limited to other homes, condos, apartments, restaurants, picnics, barbecues, etc.. Any other uses including but not limited to cutting, chopping, slicing, or peeling any other objects are in violation of this license and strictly prohibited.

BladeIP reserves the right to revoke your license at any time without reason. Once your license is revoked, you are no longer eligible for any refunds, exchanges, credits, or any warranty repairs; in the case your license is revoked, you are under legal obligation to return the knife to BladeIP at your own expense within 2 business days. Your purchase and/or continued use of this knife indicates your acceptance of these license terms.

Privacy notice: this device is implanted with an RFID chip and a small censor to track its usage. If at any time BladeIP suspects that its IP is used in a manner not consistent with this license and its property rights are being violated, BladeIP reserves the right to report such incidents to the law enforcement officials and pursue any legal options. The U.S. and international laws provide stiff penalties for IP violators and both civil and criminal penalties - up to $250,000 per violation and up to 20 years jail term.

If you need a knife with more features and uses, you may want to consider purchasing the following products:

BladeIP Starter Edition Plus+ (w/free 30-day trial barbecue license)
BladeIP Pro Edition

BladeIP also provides options for commercial licensing for restaurants and other establishments.

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Thank you again, and we hope you enjoy your new BladeIP Starter Edition knife.

Re:feeding the addiction

[zhiwenchong]

The Non-commercial stipulation is really not so restrictive as you think.

Software that can be developed include:
1) Open-source, GPL'ed apps
2) Free apps
3) Apps for internal use in an educational institution or charity
4) DAQ-type apps for fieldwork in a research group
5) Personal productivity tools
6) Testing apps

(some of the above overlap)

Re:feeding the addiction

[zurab]

1) Open-source, GPL'ed apps

You cannot add a non-commercial clause to a GPLed program - that would be incompatible with (and in violation of) the GPL. You cannot create a GPLed program with that type of restriction on Visual Studio Express.

Anyway, the joke is not on any single restriction, but the whole concept.

about time

[it0]

Smartest thing they every did.

Re:about time

[matthew.thompson]

As opposed to requiring that your PC isn't runing the Windows Firewall

From the installation notes for the Express web development package

Windows XP SP2
Issue: On a computer running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the Web download will fail, as the firewall is enabled by default.

Workaround: Disable the firewall and check to make sure the Proxy settings are enabled. This can be checked by opening Internet Explorer. On the Tools menu, click Internet Options, and then click the Connections tab. Click LAN Settings. The Automatically Detect Settings check box should be checked. If it is not, check it and click OK. Then run Setup again.

Considering the problems Microsoft are having with Windows security this just screams bad planning to me. Yes I know I can get this installed without having a problem due to having a hardware firewall but it's not going to be much help to Joe Home-User who doesn't know what he's doing 100% and blindly follows Microsoft's instructions.

Re:about time

[mousse-man]

to get infected.

Gee, this is really a viral license. I mean, try to download it and catch a virus.

Re:about time

[cubic6]

Agreed, they should've told the user how to open up the right port(s), then close them after setup is done. Let's face it, though. SP2 is still in the Release Candidates, and this is a beta. I'd be very surprised if they didn't fix this by final release.

Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, and I was already having bad feelings about asking my company to shell out the $15000 for 5 licenses of VS.Net. This doesn't help.

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[XMyth]

you should feel bad....I believe MSDN Universal is only around $375 for one license which will get you VS.NET Enterprise Architect, Professional, and standard. That's 3 licenses for $375...one more MSDN Universal and you're ready to go with one license to spare.

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[Anonymous Coward]

More like $2800.

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[DaHat]

I believe MSDN Universal is only around $375

While you are certainly entitled to your belief, I fear that you are wrong, by almost a order of magnitude.

An MSDN Universal subscription from Microsoft runs $2,799 (new subscription)... however they can be had for much less if you look on eBay for instance.

If a Subscription was $375 I'd have one myself instead of using the stripped versions (and cheap) I have been using for side projects.

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[XMyth]

Wow, I actually managed to find where I got that number from....

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.ht ml
(search for 375 and you'll see the part where he mentions it)

http://members.microsoft.com/partner/competency/ is vcomp/empower/default.aspx

There may be certain restrictions, but it appears that it is actually the case where it's possible to get the MSDN Universal subscription(s) for $375 (that's yearly though) through this program.

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[XMyth]

Damnit...sorry about the lack of hyperlinks

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

http://members.microsoft.com/partner/competency/is vcomp/empower/default.aspx

This offer is for companies only however...so my original reply is probably not valid as I doubt you could register one company twice in this program.

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, and I was already having bad feelings about asking my company to shell out the $15000 for 5 licenses of VS.Net.

Go with a MSDN subscription. Just the normal "Professional" should do. Around $1000 per license and you get a whole lot more than just VS.Net. You also get things like all the operating systems and stuff.

And don't be fooled by the "$1000 per year" thing. Your license is perpetual even if you decide not to renew your license.

I've never understood why anyone would pay more for a plain VS.Net license when MSDN offers so much more for less money.

Is a standard VS.Net license really $5000? I don't believe that. What country are you in?

Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out

[I8TheWorm]

Although you can typically get the MSDN Unversal for as low as ~$400 if your company already has a bulk licensing agreement with MS, meaning you've overpaid for lots of other stuff, and can reclaim a portion of that overpayment on your MSDN Universal. At least, that's what we did when I was at CPChem.

do they..

[Anonymous Coward]

stand out side the schoolgates pushing these?

Most important question:

[Progman3K]

Does it run under Linux?

Nope, this is NOT a troll; the earlier versions of Microsoft Developer Studio didn't run under Linux, at least nut under Wine.

Since I've abandoned Windows, but must still develop software for it, I am really curious to know if this WILL run under Linux/Wine.

Re:Most important question:

[AgntOrnge]

I'm not a software dev but is it common for people to develop on a platform different than the one they are developing for? Common sense to me says it would be a PITA as far as testing etc but like I said, I don't do it so what do I know.

Re:Most important question:

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as the code works, he doesn't care. He can blame the holes and bugs on Microsoft, and then claim Linux is much better because people really care about the code...

Re:Most important question:

[Anonymous Coward]

This would indeed be interesting

Earlier versions av VB ran under Wine so these stripped down versions might once again perhaps be usable under Wine ?

Re:Most important question:

[gracefool]

In fact, it doesn't even run on earlier versions of Windows; it requires at least Windows 2000 or XP.

Re:Most important question:

[zhiwenchong]

I doubt it.

It's likely that the IDEs are written for .NET like the current Visual Studio is. .NET programs are more or less runnable under Mono, but the problem is System.Windows.Forms, which most Windows .NET programs use.

System.Windows.Forms support is incomplete in Mono at the moment.

Re:Most important question:

[Merlin42]

Just tried in crossover office v3.0.1 and the installer fails with an extremely obtuse message:
Error:
A problem has been encountered while loading the setup
components. Cancelling setup.

Re:Most important question:

[Bazzargh]

Yes, it's very, very common. Think embedded systems. Think PDAs. Think mainframes.

Re:Most important question:

[TopShelf]

For the record, that's a very good thing. Backward compatability carries too large a security risk here...

Re:Most important question:

[nessus42]

I'm not a software dev but is it common for people to develop on a platform different than the one they are developing for?

I develop for Windows under Linux because I find Linux much easier to use than Windows. I do so using Python and Tkinter. Code written using these is typically quite portable.

|>oug

Re:Most important question:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=abandon

Re:Most important question:

[SilentChris]

"Since I've abandoned Windows, but must still develop software for it"

"Since I no longer drive a Toyota, but make parts for it."
"Since I no longer read books, but no how to write them."
"Since I no longer eat, but know how to cook dinner."

Anyone else find this statement strange?

Re:Most important question:

[ElvenMonkey]

Why on earth would Microsoft write a set of programming tools to operate under other competitors OSs? Its surprising enough that they produce versions of Office for Macs. It'd be rather akin to shooting themselves in the foot. "Here you go, here's a development tool for you to use to write software for Linux that'll reduce our income." Sure, thats going to happen.

Re:Most important question:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since I've abandoned Windows, but must still develop software for it"

"Since I no longer drive a Toyota, but make parts for it."

Do you seriously believe that not only all Toyota employees, but also all employees of third-party parts manufacturers, drive Toyotas?

No? Then you'll agree that there's nothing the slightest bit odd about someone who doesn't drive a Toyota wanting to make parts for one.

"Since I no longer read books, but no how to write them."

Is it beyond your capabilities to imagine someone making a living as an author, but preferring to spend their free time watching TV or browsing Slashdot?

"Since I no longer eat, but know how to cook dinner."

A flawed analogy. A better one would be "Since I am now a vegetarian, but my partner still wants to eat meat" - a very close one, since someone might well feel distaste for having to develop for Windows, but be required to by their job.

Anyone else find this statement strange?

No. As the other respondent said: dumbass.

Re:Most important question:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since I've abandoned Windows, but must still develop software for it,"

So you dont test your programs on native Windows machines? If not then you are an idiot, if you do then use one as a development box. And if you are developing for Windows you have far from abandoned it.

Stop trolling.

Re:Most important question:

[dTaylorSingletary]

I tried installing the Developer Studio C# Express on my Crossover Office installation this morning and it was a no-go. Perhaps others will be able to get it to install, but I certainly couldn't. Understandble of course.

I have never used any IDE in programming before and was curious, but it looks as if I will have to wait longer to try it out.

Question: Is it possible to develop Mono-compatible code while actually utilizing the tools in the IDE? (As in not just using it as a glorified text-editor).

Re:Most important question:

[Progman3K]

Whoa, sorry you got blasted with "dumbass" comments.

What I meant was that I used to use Windows at home and at work for everything.

Now, I run Linux at home and do everything with it but my job requires me to develop software for Windows.

Re:Most important question:

[Brained Child]

You could use RealBasic. http://www.realsoftware.com/

Re:Most important question:

[Progman3K]

Actually, I HAVE adandoned Windows.

I only run it at work, and even there, I'm porting our software away from MFC and other MS lock-ins towards tools like MINGW.

Ultimately, cross-compilers will produce the Windows binaries.

The binaries are tested on machines running Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2K and WinXP.

So to answer your claim of idiocy, AC, yes, we do test on native Win32, but I don't see why that would force ME to run Windows.

Re:Most important question:

[LifesABeach]

" I'm not a software dev but is it common for people to develop on a platform different than the one they are developing for?"

Yes, journymen software developers can; apprentice software developers cannot. Master software developers can change the platform itself for the Master's desired needs.

Re:Most important question:

[Patris_Magnus]

Interestingly enough I do exactly the opposite. I use KEDIT on Windoze as my main dev tool. Unfortunately it has not been ported to Linux. Samba and Putty are also indispensable tools for me as they allow me to directly save to and run programs on remote Linux servers.

Re:Most important question:

[Ancil]

Of course, people do cross-development for PDA's because there aren't any "native" PDA development tools. And obviously you can't compile firmware on the same microwave-oven which is going to run the results.

Developing windows apps under Wine just for the sake of "abandoning Windows" doesn't seem wise. Putting your own hobby horse ahead of the needs of people who use your product (and pay your salary) is not very professional.

Re:Most important question:

[metasyntactic]

Merlin42: Please go to the product feedback center and report this so that the setup team knows that there is an issue. LadyBug allows you can post feedback and bugs of this nature. Thanks!

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

Re:Most important question:

[Hortensia Patel]

Doesn't surprise me. Even on a vanilla win2k desktop, I've seen the Visual Studio .NET setup crash the box all the way down to a BIOS error screen. They appear to be doing some distinctly hairy stuff in there.

Re:Most important question:

[Merlin42]

For some reason ladybug refuses to accept my submission (I am using mozilla 1.6).

but, even if I did submit the 'bug report', would MS really care that Visual Studio won't install using wine in Linux? Especially since, for most definitions of the word 'bug', it is probably CodeWeavers (or the wine project) who has this 'bug'.

Re:Most important question:

[ElvenMonkey]

Actually, I HAVE adandoned Windows. I only run it at work, and even there, I'm porting our software away from MFC and other MS lock-ins towards tools like MINGW. Ultimately, cross-compilers will produce the Windows binaries.

As far as the open source community is concerned its quite productive to produce cross-compilters that can produce windows binaries. Windows is still the dominant desktop by a long stretch. Open source is sneaking in, both through Linux, and more so through free open source alternatives to mainstream expensive applications. It is in the Open Source movements best interest (certainly currently) to support cross-development, slowly but surely changing social exceptance of open source software. There is no logical argument for Microsoft to produce a cross-compiling development package, it would be against any kind of good business practice.

Re:Most important question:

[Bazzargh]

What's unprofessional is choosing the wrong tools for the job. Progman3k might do almost-all of his development on and for linux, but needs to build a small amount of windows software too (I'm in much the same boat myself). In this case it makes sense that he has abandoned windows, since he has little use for it, and would rather use Wine than whatever second PC/dual boot/VMware solution he currently uses.

It'd be cheaper for the people who pay his salary.

Of course I'm making assumptions about Progman3k's situation, but those are implicit in your argument too.

Way to Go Microsoft

[Fenis-Wolf]

Step #1-Release cut down versions of popular programming environment
Step #2-Get students and home users hooked on Microsoft development software
Step #3-Profit? ....well that didn't work out how I wanted it to.

Re:Way to Go Microsoft

[Fearless Freep]

This is the way it's always worked. Borland was doing it with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C a long time ago

Just like the old DOS days

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that part of early MS-DOS's success was the fact that "debug" and qbasic came with it. Granted, they are primitive tools compared to today but it did hook a lot of early developers into that platform.

Re:Just like the old DOS days

[Anonymous Coward]

Qbasic appeared with dos5. Hardly "early" MS-DOS; it was a monopoly by then after crushing competitors such as DR-DOS by the usual methods.

debug is an older tool, but the functionality of this was hardly a MS-DOS exclusive. Most devs, anyway, used the debuggers included with their compiler packages because, y'know, they didn't suck.

Re:Just like the old DOS days

[IceFreak2000]

You seem to forget that before MS-DOS 5.0, Microsoft shipped GWBasic with DOS.

Free during beta, pricing for release TBA

[damieng]

Heaven forbid that somebody reads before they submit to Slashdot... from the Express Edition FAQ:

Q: "Are the Express Edition products free?"

A: "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire."

Re:Free during beta, pricing for release TBA

[x0n]

There is one exception: SQL Server 2005 Express. This appears to be free, like MSDE was. Limited to 1CPU, 1GB of ram and 4GB database size. Also has CLR,XML support.

- Oisin

Re:Free during beta, pricing for release TBA

[Anonymous Coward]

So what?

ICQ's been in 'free public beta' for years!

Re:Free during beta, pricing for release TBA

[Murf_E]

I thought all M$ products were "easy to acquire"

Re:Free during beta, pricing for release TBA

[Anonymous Coward]

low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire

So this is different from their Enterprise products how exactly?

Re:Free during beta, pricing for release TBA

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, when you aquire the ISO off your buddies it's also "low-cost"

For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Glock27]

you visit the Eclipse and NetBeans sites.

As an added bonus, both are cross-platform. ;-)

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[treerex]

Yes, but they do not include the compiler or debugger, so you are still getting more from Express.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Anonymous Coward]

And for Python, Perl and C++ using wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) there is VisualWX.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Timesprout]

But both only cater to one language, Java, and some of the best plugins for Eclipse are not free. Interesting that you should bring up Eclipse though, a classic case of an OS IDE desperately trying to emulate the standards of a commercial offering, IDEA Intellj.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Bazzargh]

Actually, Netbeans does come bundled with the compiler and debugger:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download .html

And in the case of Eclipse, the debugger *is* bundled, just not the java runtime or compiler.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[pebs]

you visit the Eclipse and NetBeans sites.

I know we are all about open source here, but honestly.. this has very little to do with Microsoft launching Visual Studio Express. Maybe you should mention how you can code C# in Eclipse. And also mention sharpdevelop or monodevelop. NetBeans, isn't really useful for .Net development as far I know...

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Brando_Calrisean]

Eclipse doesn't cater only to Java.

The whole idea behind Eclipse is to provide a generic IDE that can be used with multiple languages.

Granted, support for other languages is still somewhat immature (although the C/C++ isn't too bad).. it's coming along.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Glock27]

But both only cater to one language, Java,

This is absolutely incorrect, Eclipse supports several languages and does so by design. A brief search revealed support for Java (of course), C++, C#, COBOL, Haskell, Perl, and Python. NetBeans is Java-centric.

and some of the best plugins for Eclipse are not free.

The release version of VS Express won't be either. Regardless, no one ever said that everything is or ought to be free-as-in-beer. ;-)

Interesting that you should bring up Eclipse though, a classic case of an OS IDE desperately trying to emulate the standards of a commercial offering, IDEA Intellj.

Eclipse has quite a lineage of it's own, since it inherited a large commercial code base from IBM. Eclipse has had a nice revitalizing effect on the Java world, and SWT is an interesting addition as well.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Glock27]

I know we are all about open source here, but honestly.. this has very little to do with Microsoft launching Visual Studio Express. Maybe you should mention how you can code C# in Eclipse. And also mention sharpdevelop or monodevelop. NetBeans, isn't really useful for .Net development as far I know...

Sure it has a lot to do with VS Express. I'd hate to see people get needlessly locked into Windows development with VS, when they could target Windows along with (essentially) everything else using either IDE I mentioned and Java.

Outside Windows, C#/CLI/CLR aren't mature, robust, or unencumbered - hence they are best avoided altogether, IMNSHO. YMMV. ;-) This may change in the future, but I'm betting not.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[aderen]

while I love eclipse and its refactoring tools are much much better than VS, it's nowhere near being express.
It's not easy to create simple projects with it. I recommended it to few friends who were learning java and none of them ever used it after installing it.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Anonymous Coward]

And in the case of Eclipse, the debugger *is* bundled, just not the java runtime or compiler.

Actually this is not quite correct.

Eclipse itself does the compiling, and only requires a JRE for running applications.

So with Eclipse, the debugger and the compiler are bundled, and the Java runtime is not.

Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh... don't tell anyone else this: the difference between VB and VC## are MINOR syntax variations.

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now everyone can create secure, robust and reliable software.

Re:Great!

[mr. marbles]

here's my credit card, where do I sign up?

gcc

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people jump to linux to learn to code because the startup cost for a compiler is 0.

This will likely stop a good number of future linux devs. :(

Re:gcc

[Umrick]

Howso? Various incarnations of gcc have existed for Windows NT/2000 for years. Cygwin and MinGW have both been available for years.

If all you wanted was gcc, then those are a heck of a lot more digestable than a full Linux distribution just to get vi and gcc.

Re:gcc

[LnxAddct]

Only the express betas are free. And only for the time being. The FAQ says they havent determined the price yet, but said it'd be low. Besides, Linux still has many many other advantages then a free compiler which you can get quite a few of for windows already, including a few from Borland which mkes pretty good quality products.
Regards,
Steve

A smart move

[Albanach]

This strikes me as a smart move. How many here discovered Linux while looking for a development platform as a student?

Microsoft are attempting to lock students in, probably even before they hit tertiary education.

Most of the big distros come with good development tools these days. Still I bet Microsoft's tight integration is going to present a new challenge to the open source community.

Re:A smart move

[Anonymous Coward]

This strikes me as a smart move. How many here discovered Linux while looking for a development platform as a student?
Microsoft are attempting to lock students in, probably even before they hit tertiary education.

While I don't deny that it's obvious that Microsoft are making their products available free or cheap because they want students to choose Microsoft rather than Linux, it's worth noting that one of the options on the registration page, under "what areas are you interested in", is "Linux interoperability".

That's right - Microsoft are collecting information on how many of the people downloading this tool care about whether their code will be portable to Linux. I don't know if that's at all significant, but it struck me as interesting.

Re:A smart move

[floki]

This strikes me as a smart move. How many here discovered Linux while looking for a development platform as a student?

All the fellow students I know who do programming in VS have a pirated copy. The price isn't really an issue when it comes to the decision of whether using Windows or Linux as development platform.

Re:A smart move

[TomV]

one of the options on the registration page, under "what areas are you interested in", is "Linux interoperability".
...
Microsoft are collecting information on how many of the people downloading this tool care about whether their code will be portable to Linux

I think this may be a slightly wishful interpretation, and the key lies in MS' use of the word "interoperability" and your use of the word "portable", which I don't think refer to the same thing at all. Depending on how Mono pans out, and how friendly MS remains towards it, this may be all wrong, but as things stand I see Interoperability referring more to technologies like Samba and SOAP, rather than Java-style write-once, debug-everywhere (sorry!) Portability.

How is Whidbey's C++ IntelliSense?

[mattgreen]

My pet project breaks VS.NET 2003's IntelliSense to the point that sometimes the IDE becomes unstable. Perhaps it is the multiple layers of template instantiation it has trouble following; but regardless I hope they have improved things on this front. At least the compiler doesn't suck as much as it used to.

Re:How is Whidbey's C++ IntelliSense?

[arkanes]

I suggest getting Whole Tomatos excellent Visual Assist plugin. It's fantastic. It too has problems with deeply nested templates, but the developers are (usually) very quick with fixes, especially if you can send them a sample of the code thats broken. No affiliation, just a very contented user.

Re:How is Whidbey's C++ IntelliSense?

[mattgreen]

I've tried it before, it is okay, the UI looks kind of 'off' from the normal VS.NET IntelliSense though.

Re:How is Whidbey's C++ IntelliSense?

[SDPlaya]

It's quite good from dabbling with it. Definitely better than VS2003. Apparently you don't even need to compile your application to get it to work, which is weird, but cool. I need to play with this more to understand how this works.

I've also tried some templated code I have, and that works well. We need to get some Boost type of people to try with their code and comment. Thus far I'm impressed, although admittedly I like Visual Studio since VS6.

Re:How is Whidbey's C++ IntelliSense?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've also tried some templated code"

It's called "parameterised" code (or "parameterized" if you're American).

--
C++ Nazis

Smart move

[suman28]

They saw SunOne and most of the Java IDE's being given away. So, to capture the user base and tie them down to Windows, they are now goign to give it away. Anyone ever notice that this "Express" is for home users only?

Re:Smart move

[Mongoose Disciple]

Anyone ever notice that this "Express" is for home users only?

I don't really see that as an issue. If you're a professional developer, you're going to want the best IDE for whatever you're doing. A rational craftsman in any field is not going to skimp on his tools.

Granted, I'm not saying Visual Studio is ideal for every project. I almost certainly wouldn't use it for a Java project, for example. However, in some cases, I believe VS would be the right tool for the job, and well worth its cost in the grand scheme of things.

Sure, I still swear and shake my fist at Visual Studio sometimes when I use it -- but no more so than any IDE I've used.

Quotes in wrong place

[jobsagoodun]

Should be on 'free', not 'express'.

free as in free beer?

[Squiddl3]

so you mean the spirit of Open Source includes free as in free beer?
I thought always that's exactly NOT the point or any point on open source.

So its a really bad try. The only thing they do is getting news coverage in connection with free. And thanks to you in connection with open source in a positive way. What a mess...

Isn't this false logic?

[nontrivial]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Microsoft on one hand selling customized and stripped versions of thier products (both Visual Studio Express here and XP Starter Edition in Thailand) and on the other hand railing against courts requiring them to do the exact same thing here and in Europe? Furthermore, didn't they say it would be impossible or at least extremely dificult to do what they are doign now in the US court they got out of?

Re:Isn't this false logic?

[orion41us]

I think you are refering to the 1998 anti-trust case where the courts tried to block win98 because it came with IE.

Re:Isn't this false logic?

[Otter]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Microsoft on one hand selling customized and stripped versions of thier products (both Visual Studio Express here and XP Starter Edition in Thailand) and on the other hand railing against courts requiring them to do the exact same thing here and in Europe?

If by "exact same thing" you mean removing completely different functionality from completely different products -- yeah, you're right.

Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Projec

[buro9]

Quote: "When you open a Visual Studio .NET 2003 Web project in Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, the project is converted to the new, simpler project layout used with Visual Studio 2005. The conversion process also converts existing .aspx pages, .ascx files and other files into a new format; for example, .aspx pages are converted to use the new code-behind model. You can therefore work with existing projects using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, but the conversion process is one-way and you will not be able to continue work with them in Visual Studio .NET 2003. Note that the conversion process creates a backup of your project before the conversion begins."

So here starts the next layer of conversion hell!

VB Express?

[Anonymous Coward]

can i install it on my linux boxen? .... and imagine a beowulf cluster of these! /think ..great RAD tool yeah so good it takes 48k to say "hello world"

all your RAD are belong to microsoft

Passport required ..

[wazlaf]

I would have loved to at least give it a try, but it requires you to log in using Microsoft Passport! Bad idea! I think many people are not willing to sign up for Passport - even for goodies like this...

Re:Passport required ..

[pebs]

I would have loved to at least give it a try, but it requires you to log in using Microsoft Passport! Bad idea! I think many people are not willing to sign up for Passport - even for goodies like this...

Big fucking deal. If you have an account on Hotmail or MSN Messenger you already have this. It's not like Microsoft will hijack your Linux box and install Windows XP Home Edition over it if you sign up. If someone is already willing to try Visual Studio, then I don't understand why they'd be afraid of Passport.

Re:Passport required ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand.

I always make one-time throwaway hotmail accounts, and making a one-time throwaway passport account is pretty much the same.

The only catch is you need a list of valid US zip codes for your "address" (you can pretty much do what you want for the rest, eg, your "name" and so forth).

Re:Passport required ..

[omicronish]

I would have loved to at least give it a try, but it requires you to log in using Microsoft Passport! Bad idea! I think many people are not willing to sign up for Passport - even for goodies like this...

Just make a dummy Hotmail account. It's virtually like downloading a program from other sites that require signing up. Remember, you're an 88-year old accountant from Zimbabwe, with name Aljsfdklsfe LKSJEFLKejf, and password asdf.

Re:Passport required ..

[baudilus]

password noted. please reply when your passport is created. We'll all d/l using that one.

Microsoft: What the.. this African accountant is downloading the same package from 15000 different IPs???

Re:Passport required ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I signed up with the name Shpx H Zvpebfbsg. Much more creative than just typing random letters... ;)

Re:Passport required ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, cause making a fake passport account is so hard... *wipes sweat from brow* whew, almost got a hernia that time

Re:Passport required ..

[RevAaron]

If someone is already willing to try Visual Studio, then I don't understand why they'd be afraid of Passport.

!@$!!!

Because if you use Passport, then M$ will track you all over teh internet!! They will install a new BIOS and sniff your packets until they manipulate you into usign C# and Longhorn and fucking the dead corpose of Linux while you sing the Hymn to Gates! THEY HAVE THAT POWER! And only you can prevent it, by not signing up at hotmail!@$!

Re:Passport required ..

[JohnGalt00]

BugMeNot.com

also has a firefox plugin!

Re:Passport required ..

[DMUTPeregrine]

Three words. Bug. Me. Not.

Re:Passport required ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute.

You were willing to create an account on slashdot so you could post stuff as someone other than Anonymous Coward. But you are unwilling to create an account with Microsoft to download some free beta?

Ok, talk about hypocrisy. Passport is nothing but yet another username/password combo you create.

Re:Passport required ..

[Anonymous Coward]

May I suggest: California, 90210?

Nice Move

[ReallyNiceGuy]

This is a very inteligent move from Microsoft to fight the Open Source movement. Making the tools free for use will (theoretically) create a motivation for writing Open Source applications for Windows. But this was already done by Borland, with its free version of the Delphi/Kylix programming environment. I think that this only shows that the pressure that the Open Source is putting over Microsoft reached the pain threshold.

Re:Nice Move

[danheskett]

I don't think MS has reached the "pain" threshold, but some interesting things are going on Microsoft:

1. They are creating a much more robust community than they ever have. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com sometime. They have a lot of their developers - and not just low level guys - blogging on a regular basis. It's an interesting thing to watch these people work. And it really gets out of that "faceless corproate entity" mold they were heading down.

2. The software is getting better. Windows is pretty reliable now. It's not perfect by any means, but Windows 2000 was the first shot. Windows XP and Windows 2003 are really quite a bit better. It's easy to joke about "the most reliable Windows ever". In the real world there isn't that dread like there was in the NT4 days about BSOD's and reliablitly problems.

3. They have opened up a lot. And they are testing the waters on where to go. The VS.NET 2005 has a pretty open feedback and bug reporting system. My guess is that if this shows signs of promise they will expand the effort and create a company-wide public bug-tracking/feature request/complaint system similiar to BugZilla or the like.

Why is this important? Open Source has some big pluses going for it. For one, the software is percieved rightly to be of higher quality. Microsoft is agressively working to beat that notion.

Second, Open Source is considered to be cheap. Of course it's "free", but we can all think how it costs in a business sense: opportunity cost, labor, upkeep, etc. Microsoft is agressively challenging Open Source on this front. If they can keep some developers who would have gone to Linux by offering free development tools, or development editions of products, then they are doing good. And MS is dropping prices on a lot of the commonly used components: Small Business Server 2003 which includes Windows server, exchange, SQL Server, and a bunch of useful features costs about 1/2 of what SBS2000 cost a typical setup.

Finally, the big thing Open Source has going is the source. You can modify, redistribute, improve, etc. That's good. But that targets a small market. We know that even in the community of Linux users 99% or higher of users never look or touch the code. A high percentage don't even compile from source. What a lot of Linux users like is that it is easy to get fixes into source (by going to the programmer who wrote the code) and the community around the product is very transparent.

MS is working very agressively to beat Open Source at it's own game. To make a company of 50,000 responsive, transparent, vital and robust without stopping the profitable business of selling software.

Right now as far as the balance sheet and growth projections report MS isn't in any pain. They are working though to maintain it's market position and beat back the growth that Linux has seen. Remember, most of the growth that Linux has seen is at the expense of other Unix vendors, not Microsoft.

Re:Nice Move

[0x0d0a]

1. They are creating a much more robust community than they ever have. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com sometime. They have a lot of their developers - and not just low level guys - blogging on a regular basis. It's an interesting thing to watch these people work. And it really gets out of that "faceless corproate entity" mold they were heading down.

It sounds nice, and I went there with some hopeful anticipation that these would be honest, straightforward thoughts from the developers that we could trust for advance data. However, quotes like this: "I see Andy beat me to the punch of being the first VC blogger to mention the new beta VC++ Express SKU. If I wasn't a Microsoft employee, I'd be downloading this right now instead of typing this entry..." make this sound like nothing more than a new marketing ploy than an actual attempt to provide users with honest, BS-free information from the developers. I like mailing lists, bugzilla/open bug trackers/forums because it means that with Open Source, I don't have to swim through oceans of meaningless crap from marketers to find out what I want. It's a *far* better environment for a user.

It really discourages salespeople to have to do this. I've found that a lot of vendors seem to not deal well with younger purchasers that were brought up on the Web being a source of actual solid data. Last time I was trying to evaluate products for a major purchase, I just wanted a damn feature and price list on the software product involved from each vendor. I'd look all over the vendor's website -- nothing, just "contact this number to obtain information". I call them up to get a feature list, and the salesguy fights tooth and nail to avoid giving me a any hard data. He wants me "to specify my needs" so that he can "assist me in making a decision". I'm quite capable of making my own evaluation, and he's quite reachable if I have technical questions, but he is absolutely scared stiff that his product won't be able to stand on its own merit, and needs a healthy dose of BS about how wonderful it is from him before I'll buy anything. It's astounding, completely contrary to the way I've always worked, and a huge waste of my time.

If there's a problem in a piece of software, I want to know about it, not have some completely ridiculous sales assurances that it "isn't an issue" or "will be fixed soon." If you're straightforward, I don't *have* to expect that the product will be perfect. *That's* why I want to be able to see what developers are saying and talk to them. Salesmen are conditioned to feed out bullshit. It's incredibly frusterating for anyone spoiled on the luxuries of the open source world, which has a very simple contract. If you have simple problems, you resolve them yourself (or have a consultant do it) to avoid consuming developer time. You check online documentation to avoid asking duplicate questions. In exchange for this simple outlay of effort, if you have serious issues that still aren't resolved, you can reach the developer, and get no-BS answers. If mutt can't do something, the people on mutt-users are going to say "you can't do that" or suggest a method of making it work, rather than trying to spin everything. It's awfully nice.

2. The software is getting better. Windows is pretty reliable now. It's not perfect by any means, but Windows 2000 was the first shot. Windows XP and Windows 2003 are really quite a bit better. It's easy to joke about "the most reliable Windows ever". In the real world there isn't that dread like there was in the NT4 days about BSOD's and reliablitly problems.

Yes, but "better than Windows used to be" is a lot different than "good". The biggest thing I heard about Win2k for home use was that "It's better than Windows 9x", which was a pretty weak claim. The issue here is how Windows stacks up to Linux, not how it compares to old version of Windows. Linux 2.6 is a lot nicer than Linux 1.0, for instanc

Re:Nice Move

[TheProcrastinatorTM]

I am glad to see MS making some positive changes, as well. In fact, I am very happy about some of the moves, like releasing some code, opening up bug tracking. And, whatever you think of their motives, MS can't help but be changed itself by some of these changes. And as the industry culture changes, MS will have to chaneg more.

What worries me though is that ultimately MS will still have to ultimately remain an enemy of open source as long as it is a software development company. The vast majority of its value right now is in its software, so it has to (1) compete (and apparently to the death in MS's thinking) with any products attempting to do the same thing as one of its own and (2) oppose any effort that would lead to opening up the code for its software, since then you wouldn't need MS anymore (they think). As long as MS is in the software development business, they will have to still be an enemy of open source. If they were to transition in to a more diverse company like IBM or Sun, there would be some hope. So how do we do ourselves and MS a favor and make them realize that software development was so 1990s? (Or do we just watch them die? :) )

Re:Nice Move

[danheskett]

(Or do we just watch them die? :) )
That's where I think you are wrong. The success of Open Source isn't in the fact that there is source per se. The success is that it fills other tangible needs.

1. Open Source doesn't have crappy restrictive complicated licensing. Microsoft needs to address this.

2. Open Source is more transparent because of the community. And not just because of the source. It is a good process. Even with most projects 99% of the people contributing are working on bug reports and/or documentation. Only a small small number contribute patches. Microsoft is addressing this.

3. There is a large market that is not diminished for software that is "good enough" - that's not everything to everyone but that is broad and general purprose. Open Source excels at very focused products. The market for larger platform and enterprise products is real even in the face of Linux. Microsoft is addressing this aggressively.

The point? Microsoft isn't dying. It's not even close. These moves they are making are pre-emptive, not a fitfull act of a dying company.

Re:Nice Move

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all things on the internet you need to seperate the signal from the noise. For a really informative blog along these lines check out this or that or this.

Free compilers!?!

[ObjetDart]

What a concept!

Re:Free compilers!?!

[x0n]

The compilers have always been free, or at least for as long as I can remember. This is about an IDE.

- Oisin

license

[abe ferlman]

I understand that this was released under a license reminiscent of the KWPL, better known as the Kjell Woodson Public License. Nice to see a little more truth in advertising!

Re:license

[abe ferlman]

Correction - that's "Wooding", not "Woodson". Sorry Kjell!

Free?

[Doomrat]

It's worth pointing out that only the beta is free, and only for the time being.

"We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire."

It's still a product.

Will this work with the Nokia Series 60 SDK?

[motown]

Hmmm...

I've been wanting to try out Nokia's free (GCC-based) SDK for Series 60 Symbian platforms, but it requires Visual Studio, which I'm not prepared to buy.

There was a website out there somewhere that explained how to set up the SDK on a Linux system, but it was quite a hassle. And the emulator (which is necessary for debugging) didn't run under Linux anyway.

Although I'd be disappointed to boot Windows once more after having used Linux exclusively for some time now, I'd really like to do some serious Series 60 development.

Perhaps it will soon be possible to combine Nokia's SDK with both ReactOS and this free Visual Studio version. At least I'd still be working on a mostly open-source development platform, then! :D

By the way, if anybody can give me some pointers on setting up the Nokia SDK without having to rely on Visual Studio (and if possible without having to use any Microsoft software) while still being able to use a debugger, then please let me know, even though this is blatently off-topic. :)

Re:Will this work with the Nokia Series 60 SDK?

[cmk76]

Sure it's off topic, but what the hell...

You can already use the free MSVC Toolkit with the Series 60 SDK, so no need to send more money to MS :) Here's what I found I had to do:

1. Install Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit 2003/

2. Install the Core SDK component of the Microsoft Platform SDK.
http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platform sdk/sd kupdate/

3. Install ActivePerl 5.6.1.
http://www.activestate.com/Products/Active Perl/
NB. The latest ActivePerl version doesn't seem to work.

4. Install the required Symbian SDKs.

5. Copy the NMAKE 1.5 files NMAKE.EXE and NMAKE.ERR into the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory.
http://download.microsoft.com/download /vc15/Patch/ 1.52/W95/EN-US/Nmake15.exe

6. Create a file called bscmake.bat in the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory with the following contents:
@echo Skipping bscmake

7. Create a file called bscmake.exe.bat in the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory with the following contents:
@echo Skipping bscmake

8. Create a file called dumpbin.bat in the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory with the following contents:
@link /dump %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

9. Create a file called dumpbin.exe.bat in the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory with the following contents:
@link /dump %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

10. Create a file called lib.bat in the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory with the following contents:
@link /lib %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

11. Create a file called lib.exe.bat in the Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 bin directory with the following contents:
@link /lib %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

You should then be able to build any of the examples from the command line by:

1. Opening a Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 command prompt.

2. Changing directory to a "group" directory under a Series 60 example (the dir that contains the bld.inf file).

3. Run 'bldmake bldfiles'.

4. Run 'abld build wins udeb'

5. Run 'epoc -wins' to start the emulator.

You can use the Debugging Tools for Windows (can be installed as part of the Platform SDK), but if you want a prettier front end for debugging try something like Borland C++BuilderX Personal.

AMD64

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this include an AMD64 compatible version of the .net framework, or are we stuck using VS 6.0 to develop on AMD64? Microsoft says they want to support 64 bit extensions, but they sure haven't been making it easy.

Not Sure about free

[Merlin42]

***FROM THE FAQ***

# Are the Express Edition products free?

We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire.

# When will the Express products, and the rest of the Visual Studio 2005 product line, be officially released?

The Visual Studio 2005 family of products will likely be released in the first half of 2005. Microsoft will continue to release Community Technology Previews (CTPs) and beta releases of the Visual Studio 2005 family of products until then.

Important to note...

[Aphrika]

...that they have made only the beta versions of the Express products free. There's no mention of whether the final version's pricing. Personally, I expect them to replace the 'Standard' editions of the languages as they stand currently.

Interesting to see SQL Server Express 2005. As it's based on the Yukon engine, that it something I'll be downloading and playing with. I have no idea what edition of SQL Server this would replace, possibly Developer in the long run? It's mentioned that it's installed in a full VS 2005 install...

Re:Important to note...

[x0n]

It looks like it's aimed at squarely replacing MSDE. It will be free, as in speech, like MSDE was.

- Oisin

Great!

[lukewarmfusion]

Now I can finally learn to program! I'll just head on over and get that Visual Basic thing, I hear it's easy to use.

When I was 11, I wanted to learn programming. I had QuickBasic 4.5 on a 386 (Win3.1), a TRS-80 (w/ Basic), and an IBM PC (w/ GWBasic). I tried to get a C compiler, but I couldn't find one on any of the local BBSs and didn't have any money to buy anything. So I was stuck with Basic.

I realize that it's easier nowadays to come by serious, free programming tools. But this is a good thing for future programmers, and a smart move for Microsoft.

Adjectives...

[k4_pacific]

So, how long before Microsoft runs out of modifiers to attach to the word addition? We have:

Visual Studio Express Edition
Windows XP Starter Addition
Windows Millenium Edition
Windows XP Home Edition
Windows 98 Second Edition
Windows XP Media Center Edition
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
Windows Server 2003, Web Edition
Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition
SQL Server Developer Edition
SQL Server Enterprise Edition

Re:Adjectives...

[marnargulus]

Don't forget their mac ports:

iVisual Studio Express Edition iWindows XP Starter Addition iWindows Millenium Edition iWindows XP Home Edition iWindows 98 Second Edition iWindows XP Media Center Edition iWindows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition iWindows XP Tablet PC Edition iWindows Server 2003, Web Edition iWindows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition iSQL Server Developer Edition iSQL Server Enterprise Edition

Re:Adjectives...

[orderb13]

Actually there are three more versions of SQL Server that you left off, adn you didn't even begin to tag the NT servers.

Can you make a commercial product?

[gr8_phk]

Will the EULA allow development of commercial products? Lots of "hobby" or "student" projects end up for sale or as shareware. Will people making that switch then have to buy the real thing?

Everyone should just download Eclipse and MinGW instead. If these aren't up to snuff then fix the problem - you're a software developer after all....

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[OptimizedPrime]

No, the licensing doesn't let you make applications and the Web Dev specifically says that you can't put it into production and that a license (I am speculating that you have to pay for) will be available after Beta 2 comes out to be able to put things into production. You're not even supposed to use this version with IIS, only with the internal, local-host only webserver

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[pr0c]

What's to stop someone from creating a non-profit hobby app using this product then using sharpdevelop, mono, pnet or even microsoft's (free) command line compiler to make the commercial version? I've never read the EULA so I don't know the answer.

Isn't kinda how gcc came about. Or maybe that was a different compiler? If memory serves the compiler used to compile gcc for the first time would not allow it to be redistributed but then they used the fresh gcc compilation to compile itself and thus the restriction was gone. Surely they thought of that with this stuff no?

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's to stop someone from creating a non-profit hobby app using this product then using sharpdevelop, mono, pnet or even microsoft's (free) command line compiler to make the commercial version?

AFAICS, just the new-to-.NET 2.0 extensions if you use them. They don't want you running production code against a beta .NET. (And some of the extensions may be in mono already anyway.)

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[GCP]

Previously, they had the very expensive VS Pro with all of the languages, plus several "Standard" editions, one for each language, at about $99 each.

People who only wanted to develop in C++ would always be interested in Visual C++ Standard. "Why do I care about Visual Basic or Visual J#?" they would ask.

But then inevitably the question would arise whether the Visual C++ Standard license allowed you to write commercial software and for some reason the answer was never very clear. Most people thought the answer was no (see Google Groups), but MS's website never managed to include that most frequently asked question in its FAQ, despite year after year of people asking the question.

I notice now that the new C++ Express Edition doesn't include MFC or ATL, which are what most people doing commercial C++ for Windows would be using, but it does make a big deal about how you can write .Net "managed C++" apps, which almost nobody is interested in.

It's a bit puzzling why MS doesn't just make the best possible development tools, including everything (MFC, ATL, .Net, fancy compiler, profiler, nice editor, etc.) and give them away to ensure a steady stream of new apps that make Windows a "must have" in order to stave off Linux.

Reducing the cost of VS Pro + MSDN from thousands to zero would almost certainly increase the quantity and variety of commercial-quality apps for Windows, much of it free, making it harder for people to abandon the platform.

They've previously commented that they don't want to do that because it would destroy the 3rd party dev tools market for Windows, but given their history, that explanation seems laughable.

It can't be that they're trying to protect their Office apps from free competitors, because those are so huge that the resources needed by any challenger dwarf the cost of a few copies of VS Pro.

Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories.

Anybody know?

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[minus_273]

"Everyone should just download Eclipse and MinGW instead. If these aren't up to snuff then fix the problem - you're a software developer after all...."

Yes,of course, i need to make a little application but the IDE and compiler aren't good enough. What should i do? fix the compiler and the IDE instead of using another one that does do the trick.

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[KarmaMB84]

The Express versions appear to be .NET pimping tools with anything that anyone else would need stripped out.

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[GCP]

That's my impression, too, though I think that any student interested in learning Windows programming now would probably do well to avoid wasting time on the vast and absurdly complicated Windows "SDK" and MFC programming models and just concentrate on .Net. There might not be enough years of life left in the old models to pay off the effort required to learn them.

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[omicronish]

Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories. Anybody know?

Actually, Microsoft is pushing .NET extremely hard with WinFX, Avalon, and WinFS, all of which are fully managed APIs (basically meaning they're .NET APIs). It seems likely that all future Microsoft APIs will be fully managed considering the size and importance of these APIs, so it makes sense to me for them to concentrate and promote their .NET development tools over unmanaged C++ tools.

In case you're alarmed, I'm sure you'll still be able to write and run unmanaged (C++/existing non-.NET stuff) code. And managed C++, which is basically C++ retargeted to .NET, will be useful as a way to access .NET APIs from unmanaged code.

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[BollocksToThis]

But then inevitably the question would arise whether the Visual C++ Standard license allowed you to write commercial software and for some reason the answer was never very clear. Most people thought the answer was no (see Google Groups), but MS's website never managed to include that most frequently asked question in its FAQ, despite year after year of people asking the question.

You can download, completely for free, the command line compilers and the runtime, and use them to create software that you can sell or give away as you see fit.

The 'Visual (x) Standard's are little more than pumped up text editors. Do you really think Microsoft want to sell you Notepad+.exe and then turn around and tell you they have some kind of claim to the content you just wrote? Even the license agreement for the standard edition restricts itself to the product and packages that come with it - no claim is ever made about ownership of a product YOU create.

Sorry to have to appeal to logic, but when I investigated this issue (our company wanted to know whether shelling out for VS was necessary over purchasing a few copies of the much much cheaper standard edition) I did find the answer to that question in a FAQ on Microsoft's site, and the answer was "Yes, you can most certainly sell your own work".

Unfortunately, as always seems the case with microsoft.com, now that I need to find that info the pages have been re-arranged and I can't find it.

Re:Can you make a commercial product?

[GCP]

No, my question wasn't why the new products encourage .Net and discourage MFC, my question was why MS didn't just give away the dev tools, thereby increasing the supply of Windows apps, thereby making Windows harder for end users to abandon.

Or you can use this...

[Zepalesque]

Or you can use this fine dot NET development enviornment.

Free

MFC not included - again

[julesh]

Just like the free command line tools, the Visual Studio C++ Express edition doesn't include MFC. This severely restricts the capabilities of the system, as almost all sample Windows code is written using MFC.

Although maybe we'll start seeing more applications that don't use MFC in future. That would be nice.

Anyone know of a free MFC re-implementation?

Re:MFC not included - again

[GSV Ethics Gradient]

The whole point is to get people writing .NET (i.e. WinForms) based applications. MFC is dead and burried as far as MS is concerned.

Re:MFC not included - again

[torpor]

You don't ----neeeeeeeeed----- MFC, and in fact I would advise you to stay the hell away from it.

Use wxWidgets, or some other framework instead. For fun, why not try something like ClanLib...

MFC is godawful. Once you've tried a few of the other frameworks that allow you to write cross-platform GUI code for Windows, I doubt you'll disagree with me ...

Re:MFC not included - again

[GooberToo]

Between wxWindows and ACE, you have an entire crossplatform framework to build just about any type of application you can dream up.

Re:MFC not included - again

[yeremein]

The whole point is to get people writing .NET (i.e. WinForms) based applications. MFC is dead and burried as far as MS is concerned.

Funny but true. I don't have the .NET framework installed on my PC, and frankly, I've never missed it. The only programs that I've ever seen that actually use it are on hobby sites like CodeGuru. Now it seems Microsoft is so desparate to lock people into its new platform that it's giving away (for the time being, at least) a WinForms compiler.

We were going to use WinForms for our newest application, but it just couldn't integrate with our existing C/C++ code, so we stuck with MFC.

Which makes me wonder--can this Visual C++ 2005 Express actually compile real C++ code? Or just Microsoft's bastardized "Managed C++" abomination? In conjunction with a cross-platform widget set such as wxWindows, it might be a useful tool.

Re:MFC not included - again

[jrumney]

WinForms will become obsolete with Avalon. Everybody knows that, and that is why noone wants to start using it now. MFC may be a nightmare, but it is a nightmare that has been around long enough that people know it.

Re:MFC not included - again

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the point. The only reason I am interested in a free copy of Visual Studio is so I can compile bits of *existing* code, such as many Windows-only open source programs, which *already* rely on MFC.

Telling me to use MFC instead is about as helpful as pulling up beside me when I run out of gas on the freeway and telling me how wonderful your new diesel auto is. Yeah, great, how nice for you, but I really don't quite see how this is meant to be relevant to my problem.

Re:MFC not included - again

[Anonymous Coward]

MFC is godawful.

No, it's just a steep learning curve if you never used the original Windows message model. Lots of us like it and use it.

Re:MFC not included - again

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, do you know where can I found ready to use ACE builds for Windows ? (DLL/or whatever).

Re:MFC not included - again

[Anonymous Coward]

WinForms will become obsolete with Avalon

Is WinForms dead?

Re:MFC not included - again

[Electrum]

No, it's just a steep learning curve if you never used the original Windows message model. Lots of us like it and use it.

Compared to the VCL or CLX, it is godawful.

Re:MFC not included - again

[matt_trentini]

No, it's just a steep learning curve if you never used the original Windows message model. Lots of us like it and use it.

Well, lots of us use it anyways...

Re:MFC not included - again

[julesh]

You don't ----neeeeeeeeed----- MFC, and in fact I would advise you to stay the hell away from it.

I don't use MFC. In fact, I have my own framework which is 10x more intuitive and lets me be just as much more productive than when I use MFC.

There are two problems.

1: When you look up something about writing Windows programs -- say you wanted an example of how to embed Internet Explorer into your application -- all of the example stuff is written in MFC. If you can't compile that to play around with it and see how to use it, then you're on your own reading Microsoft's obscure documentation.

2: A large proportion of Windows open source software requires MFC. I, personally, have Visual Studio 6, which lets me compile a proportion of it -- but that proportion is dropping rapidly, and soon I don't think I'll be able to work on 70-80% of Windows open source projects. Which is a big deal to me.

"Hobbyists?"

[kenners]

Are there many code-writing hobbyist-oriented types (still a funny term to me :) looking to download a free microsoft developer tool? I'd think most of the "hobbyists" would be affiliated with open-source programs and, because I'm an ignorant and generalizing person, alternative development platforms.

Re:"Hobbyists?"

[tehcyder]

You can get Borland development tools under a similar licence (i.e. free-as-in-beer for non-commercial use only).

And Borland certainly have more interest in cross-platform development than M$.

Re:"Hobbyists?"

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be wrong.

Not "free"

[GSV Ethics Gradient]

Note that the Beta is free but the final product won't be:

We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire.

So it will depend on the MS definition of "low-cost". I can't see any distribution limits like the old student editions that cannot be used to create commercial (or even free) software - are they hiding in there somewhere?

Re:Not "free"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't see any distribution limits like the old student editions that cannot be used to create commercial (or even free) software - are they hiding in there somewhere?

It's in the FAQ under one of the "what does beta mean" links, IIRC - it specifies that the license on these beta versions prohibits any distribution whatsoever of anything you produce with them. Evaluation and education only, mate.

Not really

[Safety Cap]

I develop servlets on my Windows b0xx3n, then deploy 'em to the *nix hardware. Locally WIndows because IT only knows how to support MS, and all the business drones couldn't do without IE ("the internet") and Outlook ("the email"). We Who Know Better use a heavy-duty OS for serving apps to the web/intranet.

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be nit picky, but you're really developing for the Java platform which is the same on Windows and *nix.

Re:Not really

[RupW]

Not to be nit picky, but you're really developing for the Java platform which is the same on Windows and *nix.

You'd hope, but I've had an absolute nightmare in the past developing for Perl on Windows, Linux and HP/UX. (For example, getpeername on Windows and Linux returned undef for a disconnected socket whereas HP/UX's returns an zeroed-out struct sockaddr.) And the boss had specified Perl for the project specifically so it'd be easier to develop for all three! Should have done it in C, grumble.

Hopefully Java will be better, and I would be comfortable developing and unit testing on Windows-hosted Java but you still need to do the final system test on the real deployment platform.

Mod parent up!

[goldspider]

Parent is right on! Looks like another case where the submitter didn't RTFFAQ.

Thses are not free as in beer (let alone speech). These are free as in 'you don't get paid to test their products for them'.

At least it is highly secure beta software

[syntap]

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition comes with a built-in Web development server that enables you to build and test applications without a dependency on IIS. The server only accepts local requests and is for build and test only.

yeah... SURE it does...

Re:At least it is highly secure beta software

[XMyth]

Actually, it accepts external requests but rejects them with a 403 forbidden message. Would be nicer if it didn't even bind to port 80 on external IPs at all if they're going to make that claim.

This was in the previous VS.NET 2005 though...not this latest one.

RAD?

[tod_miller]

Interesting ideas, but I would say VB is an excellent prototyping tool.

I wouldn't say it has many advantages in terms of real system development, and I wouldn't want to list any of the disadvantages.

VB does indeed have a fairly nice UI drawing tool, and you can simply link many forms together, some would say you can even program with it! :-)

Don't forget: Devleopers developers developers developers, etc :-)

Re:RAD?

[DeafDumbBlind]

I don't understand why people keep knocking VB.

It's a great language that can be used to solve 99% of the programing tasks on a Windows platform.
So you can't write Linux apps on it, but while 95% of the world, and a larger % of the business world runs Windows, this isn't a real limitation.

I've written multiple custom data analysis apps for fortune 500 CPG companies using VB. It would have taken me a lot longer to accomplish the same task using C++ or any other widely used language.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've written multiple custom data analysis apps for fortune 500 CPG companies using VB

You're one of those assholes I have to keep cleaning up after, huh? Please, for the love of whatever you hold sacred, stop what you're doing. I can't handle rewriting your shitty, one-tier, miscapitalized, hungarian notated, poorly commented garbage anymore.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Funny ha ha!

It's just so predictable for slashdotters to knock VB without most of them even trying it beyond the 'hello world' stage.

VB is an excellent Windows UI development tool and has all the capabilities to interface with whatever you need at the back end.

Despite the idosynchratic nature of the language, it is quite powerful and yes, you certainly can program with it!

Re:RAD?

[Threni]

> Interesting ideas, but I would say VB is an excellent prototyping tool.

Is this what you think might/should be the case, or what research has told you is the case? You might be suprised at just how many VB-coded projects are out in the real world.

Not everyone gives a shit about using every last clock cycle in the CPU. Usually the tender is won by having a solution in n months, not a solution which requires only a 1.6 ghz CPU and 256MB of ram as opposed to needing a 2.1ghz/512MB PC.

Re:RAD?

[Erwos]

The problem with prototyping tools as good as VB is that you end up using the work you did for the prototype as the "real" program.

I took an HCI course not too long ago at university, and _everyone_ (including us) who did prototyping with VB ended up using it for the final program. To be fair, this worked pretty well - but it was only for a lowly kiosk program. I'm sure it would have been much faster if we had rewritten the whole thing in C or C++.

But, yeah, VB is pretty damn good if you need to get something done in a hurry, or prototype rapidly.

-Erwos

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm sure it would have been much faster if we had rewritten the whole thing in C or C++.

Well exactly!

But if the speed was sufficient to fullfill the brief then VB was the "RIGHT SOLUTION(tm)" - yes?

Re:RAD?

[amliebsch]

"So you can't write Linux apps on it" This is incorrect. I have personally written a VB.NET console app, compiled it, and run the compiled app on a Linux box using MONO. It worked beautifully, and I could even use ANSI codes!

Re:RAD?

[tod_miller]

You are correct, there is a certain temptation to keep what you have done, as the application is capable of pushing it further, I would use an even less technical solution such as DENIM, which has a disadvantage of being less realistic.

I am glad you University is running HCI courses, I am sure Jakob would approve :-)

By much faster - do you mean performance? I can hardly believe that a lowly kiosk program would need performance tweaking :-)

But as you say, it is useful for that one step in prototyping, show to the customer, fix, even run some tests (metrics etc) on it.

Did you like the HCI course?

Re:RAD?

[tod_miller]

> Is this what you think might/should be the case, or what research has told you is the case?

I was just saying, the drag drop GUI builder does in fact give a realistic interface that will allow you to assess the accessibility, suitability, possible functionality and usability of an interface.

> You might be suprised at just how many VB-coded projects are out in the real world.

Suprised? no. Shocked? Yes! I know there are far too many VB programs out there, I wrote a lot of them! Well, a small percent, about 5 serious ones actually... ahem.

> Not everyone gives a shit about using every last clock cycle in the CPU.

If they did they would be running SETI! :-)

> Usually the tender is won by having a solution in n months, not a solution which requires only a 1.6 ghz CPU and 256MB of ram as opposed to needing a 2.1ghz/512MB PC.

That is why I program in Java (oh dear!) Java can tackle larger projects more efficiently than VB, that is my opinion, in my experience, and the experiences and opinions of those I know in the same field.

You a programmer? I think our opinions may not be at odds as you might think.

Re:RAD?

[Darkninja666]

While I have to agree that VB can do most of the things needed for small to medium sized offices, there is still one thing that bugs the crap out of me:

On Error Resume Next

I have a real problem which allows you to by pass all exception checking without a thought.
Hell, the worse program I saw in VB had "On Error Resume Next" on every fourth line of code.

As to your comment
It would have taken me a lot longer to accomplish the same task using C++ or any other widely used language.
I'm willing to bet that is because VB is your primary language. Where as, if C++ was your primary language you would say the exact opposite.

Re:RAD?

[Bandit0013]

Um... "Real system development"?

If you know anything about .NET you'd know that C#, VB .NET, etc are all compiled into the same intermediate language. Therefore no .NET language is more "Real" than any other, it's a matter of preference.

C# tends to be less verbose and more comfy for java developers. VB .NET kills C# as far as productivity when interacting with office etc.

I'd really like to see c/java coders get off their high horse about how "vb isn't a real language". It's just not true anymore.

**note anymore, yeah vb used to miss alot of things like true inheritance... that is all gone in .net

Re:RAD?

[Thinman]

May be you are right on the prototyping, but after it, on production o learning enviroment it is the worst language I've ever tried.

If you want to do something with a little diferent from how VB was designed, it takes A LOT of time and effort.

Eventually you get thinking VBliss with many loops, tricks&tips, lost variables, etc. I mean it's not a good language to learn how to programm.

Re:RAD?

[joggle]

The primary problem with VB is that it isn't easy to do things that aren't built in to it. For instance, I once had to write a program to print unusually formatted reports. In C/C++ this would have been a snap, but VB's built-in GDI functions were not nearly precise enough and exposed a pathetically small portion of Windows API (this was 4-5 years ago, don't know if things have changed since then). I could have exposed the API functions, of course, but at that point it certainly is not simpler than raw C/C++ programming.

It also isn't trivial to use DLLs where functions require pointers to structures to be passed back and forth.

I think you're over-estimating that 99% number. One of the first environments I learned to program in was VB, but it doesn't provide nearly enough flexability to do 99% of the jobs easier than using the Windows API directly (or better yet QT), at least in my experience. You'd be surprised how quickly you can get an app done in C/C++ if you have some C boilerplate code laying around (even if you don't, there is a SDK example for nearly anything you would want to do in VB, such as using the common controls, etc.).

Re:RAD?

[unapersson]

> **note anymore, yeah vb used to miss alot of
> things like true inheritance... that is all gone
> in .net

VB is also gone in .Net, it is no way the same animal it was before. You can't just pick up a VB6 program and run it under .Net, porting VB6 apps to .Net isn't even a recommended process.

It's just allowing you to use a VB-like syntax instead of the C style syntax that comes with C#. VB died with Visual Studio 6.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAD! I've been building apps with VB for years and have to say that you "VB is for prototyping" snobs don't know what you're missing. The annoyances and shortcomings of VB are more than made up for by the ease with which you can create excellent apps. We have a whole reinsurance company here running very well on VB 6 / SQL Server 7 apps - the only real problems we have are due to sloppy programmers - the language, dev environment and tools are more than up to the job. If we had started building our systems in C++ five years ago we'd be in some deep, nonfunction kaka right now. Our VB apps got up and running quick, and stayed running.

Re:RAD?

[joeykiller]

This new version of Visual Basic .Net has an VB6 to .Net upgrade wizard, that will try to rewrite your code for you so that it'll compile under VB .Net 2005.

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I think this is a good thing. The complete break with the past was alienating far too many Visual Basic programmers. Maybe this will convince some VB6 users to upgrade.

Even though VB .Net is very different from VB6, it's not _that_ different. With the new My-class, VB .Net 2005 seems to be far easier -- and more like VB6 -- than before.

BTW, I usually program Perl and I'm eagerly awaiting Perl 6, but cannot help but being a little off put by the lack of compatibility with Perl 5. I hope this won't be as alienating for perl users, as the upgrade from VB 6 to VB .Net was for VB programmers.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of it as perl's "use fatal" pragma with the defaults reversed. When you say "One Error Resume Next", you can check the error status at any point in time, and probably should after anything that can cause an error.

Re:RAD?

[DeafDumbBlind]

The abuse of "On error resume next" can be make debugging a nightmare, and error handling in VB6 is something of a pain in general.
VB.Net changed the error handling to the Try/Catch/Finally structure.

My knowledge of VB vs other languages is obviously a factor in the development time, but VB does some things, like string manipulation, much more easily than C++. I also didn't have to worry about garbage collection and the like.

Re:RAD?

[AstroDrabb]

VB is Visual BASIC. One of the first languages you learn in school (you should be progressing in your career). I tell all VB "coders" that it is time to take off the training wheels and learn a real language. Have you tried Java or C#? Much better then VB. VB and VB script really suck as a language. The few times I used it I felt like a toddler (I personally want to be challanged at work). VB is fine if you are doing standard cookie-cutter apps. Connect to a DB, display some fields, update some fields, etc. But the language just sucks for anything else. Is has zero built in support for real data structures. It has nothing like the standard template library, though most VB apps are never complex enough (algorithmically) to need something like that.

It's a great language that can be used to solve 99% of the programing tasks on a Windows platform.

Maybe 99% of the tasks you do. As I said, I would never touch VB again unless for some legacy support. Give me a language I can get my teeth into.

I've written multiple custom data analysis apps for fortune 500 CPG companies using VB.

I have worked for 3 fortune 500 companies and have been at the current one for 4 years. These are nothing more then standard cookie-cutter applications. Connect to a DB with ADO, grab some data, do some calculations, spit out results. VB does make that easy, but so do many other languages such as Java, C++ and C#.

It would have taken me a lot longer to accomplish the same task using C++ or any other widely used language.

It may take YOU longer to do it in C++, but not an experienced C++ programmer. I knock VB because using it made me feel cheap. As if I was not a "real" programmer. I want a _challange_. I will never touch VB again (except for legacy crap) and I curse MS for making it : ). Sit down for a week or two and teach yourself how to do the same things in Java, C++ or C#. I bet you will feel the same way.

Re:RAD?

[amliebsch]

Have you tried Java or C#?

VB.NET is C#, just with different syntax. VB6 was what it was, which was indeed crap compared to a "real" language. But it's dead. VB.NET is just as legitimate as C#, and it's more human-readable, too. So please, spare us your condescension. It's unbecoming.

Re:RAD?

[DeafDumbBlind]

*sigh*
********************
VB is Visual BASIC. One of the first languages you learn in school (you should be progressing in your career). I tell all VB "coders" that it is time to take off the training wheels and learn a real language. Have you tried Java or C#? Much better then VB. VB and VB script really suck as a language. The few times I used it I felt like a toddler (I personally want to be challanged at work). VB is fine if you are doing standard cookie-cutter apps. Connect to a DB, display some fields, update some fields, etc. But the language just sucks for anything else. Is has zero built in support for real data structures. It has nothing like the standard template library, though most VB apps are never complex enough (algorithmically) to need something like that.
***********

I learned to program in Pascal, VB was in version 3.0 and Java wasn't even out then...

About the only difference between C# and VB.net is that C# is case sensitive and of course the syntax.

It's good that you want to be challanged. I want to solve business problems and add value to the companies that pay me a lot of money, and I want to do it in a timely fashion. Managers and CIOs don't give a damn what's under the hood. They want to know that it works, and that you get it done on time.

Taining wheels? LOL do you code in assembler then?
I tried Java back in the 97 timeframe, it was slow as $hit back then. It's probably gotten better since then. I never had the need for cross-platform functionality, if I did, I would have given Java a more serious look.

It's funny that you mention Java and C#. Please tell me, what can I do with C# and Java that I can't do with VB.Net

And no, you're not correct about the specifics that you mention.

So what if the language name has the word BASIC in it. Would you be more likely to code in it if it was called "Visual Needlessly Complex"?

Re:RAD?

[Slime-dogg]

I wouldn't call declaring "ByVal" in every external function call "killing C#." You can work with Office in C# just as well, if not better, than with VB.NET. The fact that C# is a much smoother language to write in, compared to the "BEGIN - END" constructs and the rest of the whole VB/BASIC bullcrap.

The biggest problem that VB.NET has, that thankfully C# does not, is that all of those VB "developers" are still there. They still know next to nothing about good programming concepts, and could care less about efficiency. Woohoo... let's pass objects all of the place! Woohoo... let's make every database interaction in it's own web service... each service containing a single function! Woohoo... let's use ActiveX in .NET like there's no tomorrow, because I like writing insecure code, and I have no desire to fully learn the new platform.

VB.NET? A shotgun is probably the best solution for that language.

Re:RAD?

[blincoln]

This new version of Visual Basic .Net has an VB6 to .Net upgrade wizard, that will try to rewrite your code for you so that it'll compile under VB .Net 2005.

The 2003 VB6->.NET converter did a pretty good job as well. I tried running the source code for an ancient VB app we use here at work through it, and it would have worked perfectly except I didn't have all of the third party add-on packages that the app was coded to use.

This was a pretty large program, too.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really think VB6 is dead, you're kidding yourself. It's still going strong in the realms where it's always been used -- simple DB frontends, MSOffice automation, etc. NET is an improvement, but not for the classic VB guy.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also isn't trivial to use DLLs where functions require pointers to structures to be passed back and forth.

You've been able to do this since at least VB5, perhaps 4 aswell. Use of pointers in VB (or their percieved absence) is possibly the biggest myth of them all regarding VB

Re:RAD?

[AstroDrabb]

Umm, VB.Net is not C#. VB.Net is not more readable IMO. It is too verbose, almost as bad as Cobol. Reading the code reminds me of reading a letter from an elementary student. C, C++, Java and C# are far easier to read and follow, without having to spell out every step of the language.

How is

If (foo) Then
...
End If

Any more "human-readable" then

if (foo)
{
...
}

Have you ever tried to write _clean_ code that spans a few lines? VB needs stupid _ at the EOL, and last I checked it is limited to 15 lines.

Lets look at the Cache.Add Method of the .NET Framework

[Visual Basic]
Public Function Add( _
ByVal key As String, _
ByVal value As Object, _
ByVal dependencies As CacheDependency, _
ByVal absoluteExpiration As DateTime, _
ByVal slidingExpiration As TimeSpan, _
ByVal priority As CacheItemPriority, _
ByVal onRemoveCallback As CacheItemRemovedCallback _
) As Object

[C#]
public object Add(
string key,
object value,
CacheDependency dependencies,
DateTime absoluteExpiration,
TimeSpan slidingExpiration,
CacheItemPriority priority,
CacheItemRemovedCallback onRemoveCallback
);

What is with all the ByVal, As and _ crap? Looking at VB and VB.Net code makes me want to pull out my eyes. It is just too verbose.

Re:RAD?

[AstroDrabb]

It's good that you want to be challanged. I want to solve business problems and add value to the companies that pay me a lot of money, and I want to do it in a timely fashion.

And what does VB/VB.Net have to do with it? Are you trying to suggest it somehow takes longer in C# over VB.net? I thought you said the only difference was syntax? C# syntax is shorter where as VB.Net is more verbose and requires more lines of code to do the same task. So by your own argument, coding in C# is faster. This is actually the conclusion I have come to. The only people using VB.Net where I work over C# are the VB/ASP only guys that know _NO OTHER LANGUAGES_. I thought I would never meet a programmer that knows only one language. However, the majority of VB fans I run into fall into that category. Maybe this is why I have some resentment. I am sure there are some (not many) VB-only coders out there with some talent. I just find they give programmers as a whole a bad rap. They seem to be too corporate cookie-cutter type "programmers" for my blood and I think are responsible for dumbing down the industry. I personally don't want to see some brain-dead "language" that lets Marge the secretary "program". And I have worked with enough VB-Only corporate "business programmers" to last the rest of my career. I want to see programmer hold themselves to higher standars I guess.

About the only difference between C# and VB.net is that C# is case sensitive and of course the syntax.

And that is the most important difference. VB/VB.Net is too verbose and too much hand holding.

So what if the language name has the word BASIC in it.

I don't care what they call it. Take out all the extra syntax fluff that adds nothing to the language.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tell all VB "coders" that it is time to take off the training wheels and learn a real language. Have you tried Java or C#? Much better then VB. VB and VB script really suck as a language. The few times I used it I felt like a toddler (I personally want to be challanged at work). VB is fine if you are doing standard cookie-cutter apps. Connect to a DB, display some fields, update some fields, etc. But the language just sucks for anything else. Is has zero built in support for real data structures. It has nothing like the standard template library, though most VB apps are never complex enough (algorithmically) to need something like that.
Maybe 99% of the tasks you do. As I said, I would never touch VB again unless for some legacy support. Give me a language I can get my teeth into.

How about "English", you pretentious fuck? If you can't get simple spoken phrases right, why should we believe you're any kind of authority on what programming languages can and can't do? Comparing VB (especially VB.NET) with the BASIC you learnt in school just shows how ignorant you really are. The fact that you call C# a real language but don't even acknowledge VB.NET adds support to that theory.

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I wouldn't paint such a broad stroke with that #000 paint brush you have there.

One bit of syntax candy in VB.Net is:

dim c as object
dim cs as objectcollection

for each c in cs ...do something with c...
next

Typically in C#, it's more like:

int i
SomeObject c;
SomeObjectCollection cs;

for (i=0;i++;ics.count) {
c = cs.item(i);
}

Sure, it's not much, but it's a bit simpler in VB.Net.

Of course, there is some WEIRD verbage tacked into VB.Net...

I'll take Delphi.Net, personally...

Re:RAD?

[infinidim]

I think the grandparent was referring to C#'s lack of support for optional parmameters.

When using MS Office COM objects, there are a *stack* of methods that have optional parameters which VB.net supports natively, but in C# you need to pass System.Reflection.Missing.Value if you don't wish to pass the paramter.

But being on Slashdot and all, we wouldn't be using crappy MS Office products would we?

Re:RAD?

[Anonymous Coward]

VB.NET supports "cs(i)" or "cs.Item(i)" and C# supports "foreach (SomeObject c in cs)". Which you use is simply a matter of taste, influenced by what you may know about the relative costs of IList and IEnumerable.

Re:RAD?

[joggle]

That's not what I meant. I meant that if you want to pass a pointer to a complex structure to a function loaded from a DLL, it isn't trivial (depends on the structure, of course). You have to laboriously rebuild each structure exactly as its C counterpart. For large libraries, this is a pain in the ass.

I suppose if you made a habit of this you could write a Perl script to do much of the work for you, but I still don't like the extra work. Not to mention that most open source projects don't have VB bindings, so most of the time YOYO (you're on your own). There's a reason for this, the main one being that VB isn't cross-platform but rather solely dependent on a single vendor for its design and distribution licenses.

Re:RAD?

[aztracker1]

First, not all VB people know nothing.. and yeah, there are a lot of poorly done VB apps... I've always prefered c-style syntax, and enclosures {} .. to me a } is instinctive for a close, "End ???" isn't, visually speaking...

That said, VB is *VERY* capable when you need to perform certain tasks, or provide a quickly built interface... It sucks when you have to use the windows API (VB6)...

Moving towards VB.Net it is a lot more capable, and makes a bit more sense, and once you understand the framework, it's easier to port/deploy applications and examples in other languages, and utilize dll's written in other .Net languages. I prefer C# (my fav. language to date), but the .Net framework is a very nice environment to work in... and hope that the mono and dot-gnu projects bear fruit to other platforms...

Note that Visual Studio, especially what I have seen of the new version, is very compelling to leaving hand-coding behind...

Re:RAD?

[aztracker1]

Dude, VB.Net has been around for a few years now... Try..Catch..Finally

VB Had a place, it still does, RAD projects... VB.Net has made a TON of improvements for things.. should give it a look.

Re:RAD?

[aztracker1]

actually, my biggest two annoyances with VB (I use vb/vb.net/vbscript-asp at work allong side c#, js, and some other stuff)...

first:
VB: if (contition1 or condition2 or condition3) then
will test each condition, before the or testing.. what this means is... if (DBNull.Equals(myvar) or myvar = Nothing or myvar.ToString() = "") will fail on "Nothing" because there is no tostring, and you can't compare to "" directly..

C#: if (condition1 || condition2 || condition3)
will break out on first failure...

Second: tirnary operations
C#: string x = (condition)?"something":"else"; VB: no inline equivalent.

Other than that, I get around okay.. I think } is easier to recognize visually than "END ???" is also.

Re:RAD?

[amliebsch]

actually, my biggest two annoyances with VB I think I can help you! First: There are separate operators for short-circuiting arguments (there are some cases where you don't want to short-circuit arguments). These are

ANDALSO

and

ELSEIF

Use these to get the behavior you are looking for. So, for example,

IF DBNull.Equals(myvar) ORELSE myvar=Nothing ORELSE myvar.ToString()=""

will work.

Second: There is an inline equivalent. It is

iif(condition,resultIfTrue,[resultIfFalse]

. So in your example, the code would be

string x=iif(condition,"something","else")

Hope that helps!

Re:RAD?

[aztracker1]

thanks... still prefer c-style syntax though.. ;) but this will come in handy.

A Move in the Right Direction

[barryfandango]

Note that only the Express Betas are free - the final products will be a low-cost alternative, I suppose, for the hobbyist or beginning programmer.

What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system (like QBASIC was with DOS.) I think a lot of young programmers would get a good start if some bundled, easy-to-use development tools were waiting for them on install (Like C# Express right next to WordPad in the Accessories folder.)

It's sort of amusing that as Microsoft continually "expands" the concept of what qualifies as an OS (Web Browser, Media Player) they've removed another element that used to be considered primary and indispensable.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[mratitude]

I remember those days too. However, the important reason for having asm and basic was because there weren't thousands of software titles on the shelf. :-P

I'd agree though that it would still be useful to have some basic development tools situated and optimized for the OS installed on your PC.

I could point out that Linux has done this since the early days of the kernel but I won't troll.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[corris]

XCode comes with all new macs! now, it's not the best IDE, allot of mac developers favor Codewarrior, but, it's almost there.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[x0n]

"What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system".

Wouldn't we all; but you can't have it both ways. Microsoft were spanked for bundling IE, and we cheered. Don't you think they'd be spanked even harder for bundling VS?

- Oisin

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system

Ahh, the good old days... you mean the "to-days"

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[alecks]

I guarantee you that MS would LOVE to give away for free all of Visual Studio to anyone who wants it. The reason they don't do this, is that it will put 3rd part development tool businesses, well, out of it. This in turn will may force a lot of developers to go non-microsoft

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[joeykiller]

Well, this perhaps isn't exactly what you want, but every copy of Windows XP ships with the Windows Scripting Host. What this means is that you can write small and large programs in JScript/Ecmascript or VBScript. You can do quite a lot of automation trough this technology. It's a surprisingly capable environment, though if you want something for creating apps with GUI's you're out of luck.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[ezy]

See Mac OS X and XCode. It's distributed free with the Panther OS on MaxOSX machines. I thought that was a great change in the current status quo of charging for development tools, frankly. However, I'm not sure whether it's really easy enough to use for a rank beginner or not. Maybe there's AppleScript.. Never seen it tho.. it might be suitable.

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[LeftOfCentre]

Windows codename "Longhorn" will include compilers and build tools, at least for C# and .NET (not sure about C++, but that language is pretty much deprecated anyway in the Windows world, as Microsoft sees it in the long term).

Re:A Move in the Right Direction

[omicronish]

What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system (like QBASIC was with DOS.) I think a lot of young programmers would get a good start if some bundled, easy-to-use development tools were waiting for them on install (Like C# Express right next to WordPad in the Accessories folder.)

The .NET Framework and SDK are free and come with C#.NET, VB.NET, and VJ#.NET (does anyone use this??) command-line compilers. I think .NET is automatically installed with Windows 2003 Server, and it'll definitely be included with Longhorn, so yeah, it looks like development tools will come preinstalled in the future. True, it won't come with an IDE by default, but you could develop with Notepad or the free and open-source SharpDevelop.

It's also unfortunate that a C++ compiler won't come preinstalled, it seems, but Microsoft provides the free Visual C++ Toolkit which has an optimizing C++ compiler. You could also go with an open-source compiler such as gcc.

Suppose they're afraid

[Eudial]

Suppose they're afraid that if everyone starts out with applications like KDevelop and Eclipse they'll loose ground. I'd be if i were them.

Missing the [share|free]ware scene?

[Basje]

A few years back a lot of software was made by hobbyists to scratch an itch. Many of these programs weren't much, but it kept a lot of computer enthousiasts on windows, and made for some very innovative/useful tools.

Nowadays, this niche is largely filled with F/OSS. Thus the MS platform is deprived of free help for home users, and misses out on home innovation. I cannot help to think MS is trying to win back some hobbyists/developers to their platform. This move reinforces that thought.

Re:Missing the [share|free]ware scene?

[mikael]

Nowadays, this niche is largely filled with F/OSS.

For me, the interest in writing software is the chance to do something new and original, while still professional looking. With Windows, for any idea that you have, a quick search will immediately reveal that similar applications have already been written for Windows. While there are cheap, shareware applications that appear to have been knocked up over a weekend, there will always be at least one shareware version with custom skins, available boxed, with written manuals. For windows, the incentive of writing any piece of shareware, was that you just might have a chance of making some cash from your efforts. But when you see that you are competing against such products, it becomes immediately obvious that this isn't going to happen.

Linux, is still very much pioneer country.

MFC missing is a *bonus*, not a *bug*

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suspect most of the bloat in Microsoft products comes from MFC.

Why bother with it?

A + ? = Profit

[syntap]

We have a rich databinding model in Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 -- one that supports binding ASP.NET controls against a variety of different data sources. One of these data-sources is the "" control, which is specifically designed to enable you to bind against middle tier object layers, enabling true n-tier databinding using ASP.NET 2.0 controls.

Even the data source control names are in beta I guess.

Avalon/XAML

[Anonymous Coward]

Are these technologies covered by these tools?

Re:Avalon/XAML

[XMyth]

VS 2005 beta does cover Avalon/XAML development. Don't know about the express versions.

Though, I believe you need to be running longhorn to be able to actually run an Avalon/XAML app.

May NOT remain free

[Neil Watson]

Read carefully from the FAQ:

Are the Express Edition products free?

We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire.

Stripped down versions & Alternatives

[tod_miller]

Man, I ain't got time to waste on waiting for a cheaper stripped down version, I just ripped the iso off some warez server, erm, I think it was ftp.suse.com :-)

Alternative to Visual Studio:
Eclipse

That is it! You can develop in C++, Python, PERL, XSP, Eiffel and even *gasp* Java :-)

Microsoft do have decent development software, you cannot deny that it is that, decent.

Re:Stripped down versions & Alternatives

[HFXPro]

Have you ever used CDT? It is a freaking joke compared to Visual Studio for developing C++. Code completion doesn't work half the time. It eats my prefered style of coding. The only place where I really see eclipse as a top notch is in the Java area. Yes I am a strong supporter of eclipse. But I've yet to see most of the other language support be any better then emacs.

Re:Stripped down versions & Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Central Dalylight Time everyday. Yet I would never say it for cdoes code completion in half the time. Yes Central Dalylight Time would eat into your coding style. I see the perfect place to use Central Dalylight Time everyday and I like jave too. We had a lunar eclipse the other day and did you see the lunar passing of venus?

Re:Stripped down versions & Alternatives

[tod_miller]

I love emacs. Great, but I find the wholesome, wholegrain ide goodness of eclipse too much of a draw.

And did I mention refactoring? no I didn't. :-)

Express Editions?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the express refers to the fact that the compiler in these versions will let anything get compiled even if it doesn't work - now thats express!

how about some free cigarettes?

[192939495969798999]

Visual Studio encourages people who don't know what they're doing to go into the biz, then once you're hooked, you have to buy the products... eeww!

Re:how about some free cigarettes?

[tehcyder]

So it would be better if all software was incredibly expensive and difficult to use in order to discourage all those "people who don't know what they're doing"?

Or was that a joke?

Re:how about some free cigarettes?

[192939495969798999]

I'm pretty sure anything that ends in eeww is a joke. :)

Re:how about some free cigarettes?

[mattgreen]

This is Slashdot, where any argument that actually makes sense gets modded either to +5 or -1.

Glad to be prgramming in VB

[Zepalesque]

The guy assigned to use the VB express edition of looks positively ecstatic.

Re:Glad to be prgramming in VB

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought all of the pictures were amusing choices... the VB guy looks a bit of a bimbo, the web dev is graphic designer-esque, the J++ guy looks like a dotcom burnout (and that's the only reason anyone would still be using it :)... sql server guy has a tie...

Hooray for stock photography!

Maybe they are trying to find an answer to XCode

[foidulus]

XCode is probably more analgous to this release than open source *nix tools. Apple distributes XCode free with Panther(and an updated version will come out with Tiger). It is free as in beer, but not open source. However, the panther release probably isn't as nice as Visual Studio, here is hoping they improve some stuff in 2.0...
However, you can release commercial code with XCode if you so desire. Although it doesn't have BASIC or C#, it does have support for Java, applescript, and more.
Feh, I still think I will stick with XCode.

How are these different from...

[jalefkowit]

... the "Standard" editions of VS.NET 2003? You can currently buy these cut-down versions of Visual Studio that only support C#, VB.NET, "J#" (whatever nightmare spawn of Java that is), or C++ for about $100 each. I imagine that when these "Express" products leave beta we'll see them priced at about the same level.

Re:How are these different from...

[spideyct]

I would imagine they will be priced less. For exactly the reason you state. If the full "standard" edition is $100, I imagine a pared down "express" edition will be noticably less.

Microsoft knows how to market commercial software (I think they've been accused of inventing the concept), I think its fair to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that there will be a difference.

Of course, we won't know until they are released.

Visual Studio == Free

[tod_miller]

For students in the UK (at certain Universities) Visual Studio is given away for free to Students, they are allowed to use it for personal use even after they graduate.

Students of today are the PHB of tommorow!

Re:Visual Studio == Free

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF!!!!!!!!!!!WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HOLY SH1T What UK University is THAT! :)

When I started Uni I used DJGPP (UGH! DOS IDE)...
then Borland (Pragma What?)...
but now im a PG student and can get a campus license (staff/PGs) but not for home use.

I now use the brilliant DEVCPP at home!
The only reasons why I would want to use M$ is their stupid WORKSPACE PROP FORMAT!!! and some weird linking errors because of differences between M$ and GCC.... (Gayness)

Although if it's an "ex"-poly it may not be worth signing up :)

Re:Visual Studio == Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm.. those copies are certainly not free. Apparently they don't teach you that TAANSTAAFL in the UK. Microsoft is taxing your tuition or your government to pay for those free copies.

Re:Visual Studio == Free

[EvanED]

This is true, but...

I go to PSU. For a while students got a number of pieces of software (VS.NET, WinXP, Office, FrontPage, ec.) for free. I realize that our technology services fee was probably a bit higher because of it (and if not something else was), but on the other hand, not *that* many students got them, so the price to PSU was much less than just 40,000 * (educational price). Thus other students were significantly subsidizing my software cost.

And in turn I help to subsidize their athletic programs, or whatever, so it works both ways.

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[City Jim 3000]

Same thing happened when I went from VS.NET 2002 to 2003. It did hamper my interaction with the other devs for a week, mostly because VS.NET takes f-ing ages to install (one full working day on one of the computers).

A new strategy from Redmond

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This wasn't a very unexpected development(no pun intended)

MS are worried that the windows platform is hemorrhaging developers to linux/OS X platforms. And as MS know; more developers, means more software, means more users, means more money, means more developers, etc , etc...

These downloads are aimed at drawing younger, paticularly student developers, to coding in a windows enviornment. Previously, every programming course I ever heard of started with C and Java, because of the low cost of development tools. If MS release free Dev tools, I can see schools and Universities switching to teach VB and C#, so their students are ready for the "real world".A lot of people in my course complain about this, paticularly after internships. When people don't have to pay $600 for Visual Basic, I think its uptake might increase, just a little.

Looks like a long term strategy I think. The question is will it work?
I figure it will draw more programmers back to windows, paticularly those frustrated by the C++/EMACS/Shell method of programming, which is admittedly a tough nut to swallow for the budding hacker. Most these days are likely long term GUI users, much more at home in Visual Studio type enviornments. I know I was! That why I got anjuta Anjuta be praised!! :E

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[GooberToo]

paticularly those frustrated by the C++/EMACS/Shell

Or, they can use C++/XEMACS/Shell and everything is easy as pie. Unless you're willing to argue that pushing a "compile" or "debug" button is too hard. ;)

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Threni]

> MS are worried that the windows platform is hemorrhaging developers to linux/OS
> X platforms

Really? Where is your evidence that 1) this is happening, and 2) that it is and that MS are worried about it?

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[FroBugg]

You must not have heard of very many programming classes. I took one at the local community college four years or so ago, and it was all VB. Most of the work was done in the school computer labs. Our textbook included a watered-down version, but I got a full version for my own use from a friend.

This was a regular college course (no extraordinary fees) for people with little to no programing experience.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[relativePositioning]

Here are a couple links to some great free C++ IDEs which have builds available for Win32 and for Linux. Both environments rely on GCC for compilation and they are perfect for students.

Dev C++
MinGW Developer Studio

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[PPGMD]

I can see schools and Universities switching to teach VB and C#, so their students are ready for the "real world".A lot of people in my course complain about this, paticularly after internships. When people don't have to pay $600 for Visual Basic, I think its uptake might increase, just a little.

Haven't been to a University with a Microsoft Campus agreement? They get almost all the Microsoft Software for free.

Need the Windows 98 disc, goto the Library and check it out for a day. Need Visual Studio 6, bring 2 CD-Rs to class, by the next class they will burn you a copy.

Heck the University I went to handed out Office 2000 (actual Microsoft discs with unique CD keys) during orientation.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[orderb13]

I personally develop with MS products everyday, and for the most part hate them. There are some things about them that I do enjoy, and like, but the thing that really pissed me off is Microsoft's .Net 2002 and .Net 2003 move. I'm even certified in SQL Development (which I don't hate quite as much as .Net). I'm also looking to make a switch from MS to Java, just don't have the time yet to invest in learning a new language. As far as Microsoft being worried, I would have to say that they are. In a recent survey I took for them (it was sent to a random sampling of MCPs) they asked what certs I was planning on getting in the future and had spaces check boxes for many non-MS certs. They also asked how happy we were with MS as a company. I think they are finally getting the idea that a large protion of the people that use their developement tools hate the company and the tools.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Threni]

I personally develop with MS products everyday, and for the most part hate them. There are some things about them that I do enjoy, and like, but the thing that really pissed me off is Microsoft's .Net 2002 and .Net 2003 move. I'm even certified in SQL Development (which I don't hate quite as much as .Net).

All of that is also true for myself, but that doesn't provide proof of either of your previous statements.

I can't be bothered learning Java. When I first looked at it, it just looked like a crippled version of C++, designed to make it easy to teach to clueless CS students. I don't care about the `safe programming` side of Java, as I code non-internet apps (in VB and C).

As far as Microsoft being worried, I would have to say that they are. In a recent survey I took for them (it was sent to a random sampling of MCPs) they asked what certs I was planning on getting in the future and had spaces check boxes for many non-MS certs. They also asked how happy we were with MS as a company. I think they are finally getting the idea that a large protion of the people that use their developement tools hate the company and the tools.

Sounds like good business practice to me. I've probably been offered such forms to fill in but I can never be bothered (I have a habit of always giving incorrect answers when confronted with any kind of questionaire anyway, so that's probably good news for MS). I'd imagine that MS was asking these kinds of questions before Linux had the massive 4% (or whatever it is) control of the desktop market it currently has.

BTW what's wrong with MS's tools? I think that what one can do - from scratch , with a copy of VB and SQL Server 2000 and a few evenings - is simply amazing. Care to name some other products which are as functional. And don't mention Delphi. Pascal is a little to 1980's for my liking. And don't mention MySQL either - unless it has triggers and stored procedures now.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[orderb13]

The proof that MS is loosing developers is implicit in my statement, since I am a MS developer planning on leaving MS development. As far as coding non internet-apps, I'll have to agree with you that VB and C are definatly the way to go. The problem arises when coding internet apps. I have not been impressed, for various reasons, with the web development that microsoft tries to push through. As far as functionality is concered, there are some things that SQL Server does well, but many that it fail misserably at (such as very large database management). If you're just wanting to write some quick apps then SQL Server and VB work really well for this (esp with .Net's integrated development tools), but for enterprise level apps, you definatly don't want to take that route. As far as using triggers is concerned I'd be just as happy if those were taken out of all databases, as usually they are not documented and the programmer never has any idea they are there until something wonky happens. For personal programming and anything that I need RAD for I'll take VB, but for truely large enterprise level applications, esp ones that are web centric, MS just doesn't cut it. After all, how many large corporations do you know that use MS for their enterprise level apps?

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[The Bungi]

Just how exactly do you figure this "hemorraging"? I'm not saying it's not happening (or going to happen), but if you're going to assert your claims as fact to support the rest of your post then I think you'd better give us some backing proof, mmm?

I work with literally hundreds of developers, corporate and freelance consultants in four major IT/consulting markets in the southwest, as well as Mexico, and I just do not see this happening. I'm seeing some developers that claim they know Linux or Perl or have experience with wxWidgets and so on, but all that is far from the "mass hemorraging" you claim.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Threni]

> The proof that MS is loosing developers is implicit in my statement, since I am
> a MS developer planning on leaving MS development.

I'm sorry, but what you plan to do is not proof that real programmers are leaving MS development tools. What are they going to do instead? Code on OS/X? That's nice. But what are they going to do to pay the rent? There are more positions in the Kama Sutra than in the OS/X development world, and they're all taken. And not by attractive Asian girls, either!

I'm sure Linux rules the Internet/Server world, but unfortunately that's all server side stuff, and will have no effect on the desktop, and subsequently no effect on Linux take-up by non-developers.

>how many large corporations do you know that use MS for their enterprise level >apps?

That's too vague a question. I'm sure most large corporations have windows desktops on most of their machines, even if they have non-MS OSs on their back office machines. I just don't know. I'm sure a lot of them have a combination of servers for different takes. They'll probably have a windows server somewhere, if only for use as Microsoft Exchange server for email, print jobs etc.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[orderb13]

I'm not saying that they are leaving a windows system (although it happens), simply that MS is losing programers to no MS developement tools (such as Java which can be developed in windows or in Linux). I'm also not saying that MS is losing market share in the OS deparment (or at least not much). Windows is very easy to use, esp when compared to something like UNIX, and I really don't see the vasy majority of people taking the time to run a UNIX box instead of a Windows box. And yes, large corps do indeed run windows on most desktops, but they also use Java apps (for the most part) which don't have to be run on a MS OS. MS made a play for enterprise level development with their .Net series (it was developed to compete head to head with Java), but sadly lags far behind.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Threni]

I'm reading up on VB .net at the mo. Seems ok to me. A bit different to regular VB, but with what appears to be much of the power of OOP design, and in a way that makes it much easier to interoperate with other modules/languages. I'm not even sure in which way a VB .net app would be inferior to, say, a C# .net or C++ .net one.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't saying that a VB .Net app was inferior to other .Net apps. They are all suppossed to act the same. I am saying that any .Net app is inferior to a Java app (at least on the web end of things)

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in the corporate world, Microsoft is in a real fight with Java. I see VS.Express as a counter to Eclipse.

Of course, most Java programmers are on Windows, and not Linux/OSX/etc.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Aaul]

Yep, this is very true. It's called the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, and if you're an IT student at a school you will most likely be signed up for it automatically upon enrolling. I was, and once my account became active I was able to purchase a multitude of MS products for just the cost of media and shipping.

I picked up a copy of Windows XP Professional for about $7, and Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic (which is pretty much identical to Professional; I believe the only things missing are enterprise-like tools such as source/project management tools, etc) for $11 which included the most recent MSDN library CD's as well.

You can buy Windows 2000 Professional, Office XP, Windows XP, VS.NET, MSSQL Server (I think), and a couple other high-dollar products. Membership is free as long as you're an IT student. However, if you change majors they are pretty quick about removing your access. I lost mine within two weeks of switching to a non-IT major.

-James

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[Anonymous Coward]

When people don't have to pay $600 for Visual Basic

Visual Basic is only $199, dipshit. And with student prices it is even cheaper.

you == FUD

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

That's Insightful FUD if you please AC

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[0x0d0a]

"FUD" != "BS".

FUD is a subset of BS.

FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is a particular type of BS where the liar is a propagandist who produces a cloud of vague assertions to instill a general sense of worry about how good something is. Microsoft is known for doing this toward Linux, since it is very hard to come up with concrete points of criticism where their products win.

The statement was BS, but was not FUD.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[0x0d0a]

Yeah, lovely agreement.

One of the terms is that the univ. cannot disclose the terms of the agreement. If part of that agreement is "cannot use Linux on-campus", they can't disclose it.

Re:A new strategy from Redmond

[PPGMD]

One of the terms is that the univ. cannot disclose the terms of the agreement. If part of that agreement is "cannot use Linux on-campus", they can't disclose it.

Wasn't part of the terms at either of the schools that I have been to. They both used Linux in certian areas.

Annoucing emacs express

[oneself]

In response to Microsoft's announcement earlier today, GNU released a
statement announcing Emacs Express. Weighting at around 20M Emacs
Express comes in Ada, Antlr, Awk, C++, C, Delphi, Fortran, HTML, Java,
LaTeX, Lisp, Metafont, Metapost, Modula 2, Octave, Pascal, Perl, Pike,
Prolog, Python, Ruby, Scheme, SGML, Simula, SQL, TCL, TeX, and XML
flavors.

No you can't

[orbios]

In the FAQ they state that: "There is no "Go live license" for this release. That means you cannot publicly deploy any applications you create with the beta. This is for testing and evaluation purposes only."
So, no, you can't develop a commerical product using the Express Editions.

Re:No you can't

[Quarters]

"beta" does not equal "Express Editions"

Just because the FAQ says you can't deploy solutions made with the beta Express Editions it doesn't necessarily mean or imply that you can't do so with ther release versions.

Re:No you can't

[julesh]

That's because it's a beta. I think this is a standard condition in MS's beta compiler licenses.

You're lucky

[szo]

never tried to use namespace in VC: even if the compiler manages to understand them, the debugger is left out in the cold, and fetches you whatever symbol it pleases. And the editor... Like something left from before vi.

Szo

Re:You're lucky

[Eccles]

Our use of namespaces is limited, but I haven't seen a problem. As for the editor, I'd pay money to have bookmarks in CodeWarrior (the Mac dev tool I use)... There are some clunky bits, and its ability to resolve like names in the "go to definition/declaration" command seems to have gone backwards in .NET compared to VC6, but it's certainly a tolerable tool.

Re:You're lucky

[miu]

The namespace matching problem in the debugger is common to all debuggers. Most have the ability to pretty print mangled names after you dump them, but no ability to match a namespaced symbol in the first place. This holds true for every version of gdb 4.0-6.0 and the versions of dbx that come with Sun Workshop (or Forte or whatever the hell they call it this week) through version 6.0 update 2.

I'd love to use namespaces as they were intended, but because of the debugger problem I just use static members of a struct to emulate a namespace.

VC actually has pretty decent namespace support, they added (working) support for the 'non-.h' std-c-lib headers existing in the std namespace before anyone else.

C++ is a big language with lots of runtime requirements, I don't think any compiler or library vendor could be said to have the whole thing correct (and working with all support tools) according to the latest standard yet.

No MFC/ATL in Visual C++ "Express"?

[nullset]

So that makes it not very useful......

I try to avoid MFC/ATL in my code, but sometimes it's a necessary evil.

Try bloodshed.net - free compiler

[tod_miller]

They have a decent UI for the mingw C++ compiler. You can package it together with allegro and some nice game apis.

Also try sharp-develop at www.icsharpcode.net/ , a free .net c# (I heard this being called C-Pound in the states) ide, that is fairly damn good!

Re:Try bloodshed.net - free compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time i looked (months ago) it didn't work with mono ?

Re:Try bloodshed.net - free compiler

[cubic6]

"I heard this being called C-Pound in the states"

Nope, we pronounce it "C-Sharp" just like the rest of the (English-speaking) world :)

Let's not forget SDK.....

[orion41us]

To write/compile and run any of the .NET languages you really do not need VS.net. Visual studio is nothing more then a nice (_REALY_NICE_) development environment and debugger. You can write your C#/VB.net/ASP.net code in notepad and compile with the command line. The compilers and documentation is part of the SDK that you can download from MS at no charge ;) as well as distribute your compiled code w/o any royalties (I think).... They really do not advertise this as they want every one to spend $$ on the VS.net but that is completely unnecessary.

Re:Let's not forget SDK.....

[awitod]

If you want to go completely free and use a nice IDE, try #develop. It isn't as nice as VS, but it is astoundingly nice for a free (as in speech) IDE.

Re:Let's not forget SDK.....

[RevAaron]

I second this. #develop is nice- you can dev for VB.NET or C#, and probably any other language that is hosted on .NET. Between it and the free MS SDK, it's all you need to start learning and coding for Windows- and Mono!

Re:Let's not forget SDK.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Compiling from the command line is possible. However, these don't include nmake, so any project requiring a makefile should use Borlan's free commmand-line compiler, or MingW.

Re:Let's not forget SDK.....

[Anonymous Coward]

nmake is included in the Platform SDK. It's for Win64 development, but it's identical to the one for 32-bit development.

Re:Let's not forget SDK.....

[twaltari]

And for completely free C++ development with an excellent optimizing compiler you can use Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 with Platform SDK. Only command line tools are included. You could use Eclipse CDT or Emacs as an IDE.

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[XMyth]

Shouldn't be too bad. All the new code-behind model does is take all the RAD wired events and properties that were in the same source file as all your code and put them in a seperate source file. This was one of the purposes of the new "partial classes" feature of .NET 2.0.

VC++ Express EULA

[Satan's Librarian]

End User License Agreement
Be sure to carefully read and understand all of the rights and restrictions described in the EULA. You will be asked to review and either accept or not accept the terms of the EULA. This product will not set up on your computer unless and until you accept the terms of the EULA. For your future reference, you may print the text of the EULA from the eula.txt file of this product. You may also receive a copy of this EULA by contacting the Microsoft subsidiary serving your country, or by writing to : Microsoft Sales Information Center/One Microsoft Way/Redmond, WA 98052-6399.

IMPORTANT--READ CAREFULLY: This License Agreement for Pre-Release Software ("Agreement") is a legal agreement between you (either an individual or a single entity, referred to in this Agreement as "Recipient" or "You") and Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft") for the pre-release Microsoft SOFTWARE (as defined below) that accompanies this Agreement. An amendment or addendum to this Agreement may accompany this SOFTWARE. YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT BY INSTALLING, COPYING, OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY, OR USE THE SOFTWARE. Microsoft may, in its sole discretion, also provide further pre-releases of the SOFTWARE or related information to Recipient hereunder, in which case such further pre-releases and related information shall also be covered hereunder as "SOFTWARE."

MICROSOFT CORPORATION LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE

Microsoft SOFTWARE: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, BETA

Accompanying this Agreement is a pre-release copy of the Microsoft software identified above which includes software, and related documentation and information (collectively the "SOFTWARE"). The SOFTWARE is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. The SOFTWARE is licensed, not sold.

NOTICE: THE SOFTWARE IS TIME SENSITIVE AND IS DESIGNED TO CEASE FUNCTIONING ON MARCH 1, 2005. NOTICE OF EXPIRATION WILL NOT ACTIVELY BE GIVEN SO YOU NEED TO PLAN FOR THE EXPIRATION DATE AND, PRIOR TO SUCH EXPIRATION, MAKE A COPY OF AND REMOVE YOUR DATA THAT YOU WISH TO USE IN THE FUTURE.

1. LICENSE.

(a) Subject to Recipient's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Microsoft grants to Recipient a limited, non-exclusive, nontransferable, non-assignable license to install, reproduce and use the SOFTWARE on up to ten (10) computers residing on Recipient's premises, solely for purposes of testing software programs that run in conjunction with the SOFTWARE, and to evaluate the SOFTWARE for the purpose of providing feedback thereon to Microsoft.

(b) The SOFTWARE contains time sensitive and beta prerelease code that is not at the level of performance and compatibility of a final, generally available, product offering and may not be used in a live operating environment where it may be relied upon to perform in the same manner as a commercially released product or with data that has not been sufficiently backed up. Due to the nature of the development work, Microsoft provides no assurance that any specific errors or discrepancies in the SOFTWARE will be corrected. Recipient expressly acknowledges and agrees that the SOFTWARE may change substantially prior to commercial release of the SOFTWARE.

(c) Internet-Enabled Features. Since this SOFTWARE is a prerelease version, some of its Internet-enabled features are turned on by default. Those features collect information from your computer and send it to Microsoft. The default settings in this version of the SOFTWARE do not necessarily reflect how the features will be configured in the commercially released version. For more details about these features, what information is collected, and how it is used see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=25076. If You choose to install and use this SOFTWARE, You authorize the automatic collection

Re:VC++ Express EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

OF FITNESS F0R A PARTICULAR PURP0SE, OF RELIABILITY OR AVAILABILITY, OF ACCURACY OR C0MPLETENESS OF RESP0NSES, OF RESULTS, OF W0RKMANLIKE EFF0RT, OF LACK OF VIRUSES, AND 0F LACK 0F NEGLIGENCE, ALL WITH REGARD T0 THE SOFTWARE

SH1T I cant sue M$ for a LACK OF VIRUSES in their program.... I WANT MORE VIRUSES AND NEGLIGENCE, DAMNIT!

PS... M$ should go back to school to use proper use of commas, and clear writing :)

WINE compatibility

[DFossmeister]

I think this is actually a great idea. If the developers did their work under WINE, and tested their work under WINE, then it would work under regular Windows and WINE too, thus having a wider area of acceptance and less work for the WINE guys to do, fewer corner cases for them to code around.

On top of all this, I'm sure that since WINE is user space, you would not be able to crash your entire OS like you can still do with any Windows OS and messed up software.

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[tesmako]

Name one major file format that is forward compatible with a new featureful release. This is natural and very much to be expected.

Not True...

[Phil John]

...at the moment Eclipse only has a polished "perspective" for Java, that is true, however Eclipse is a rich client-side application framework, not just a kick-ass JDE.

Currently in development is a perspective for php - last time I used it there were a few bugs but it was usable. You could create a perspective for PostgreSQL database development if you wanted, the specs are out there any open, it's just that nobody has bothered yet.

Ahhh ....

[gstoddart]

if all software was incredibly expensive and difficult to use

Is that why. I just assumed they were design features. ;-)

if it's that important to you

[jbellis]

then you should shell out a couple hundred bucks for VMWare.

Non-Professional Programmers?

[q22b]

Ahh, I see, if you are a programmer and you use Linux, you are a "Terrorist". If you use Windows, you are a "Non-Professional". If you use Windows and buy the $2500 versions, you are a "Professional". It is all clear now.

Coincidental that this comes up...

[Mitleid]

...as I've recently downloaded and fell in love with a nifty little free program called SharpDevelop as I've wanted to build some VB applications for a while now but just have no desire to pay so much for a development environment that should be free in the first place. My philosophy is that a development environment encourages use of a particular platform, and while I understand that it costs money to put them together, you're going to get much better developer support in the future if you release your toolsets for free. I mean, look at the various FPS and Neverwinter Nights modding communities. Yes, while mods are not always a commercial product like a software package built in Visual C++ or something, they still build a great deal of support for the initial program and extend it's usefullness for quite some time.

Anyway, I'll quite babling and just say that I think it's about time Microsoft did something like this. I've always been baffled that a Visual Studio suite runs upwards of $1000, and the lesser versions still can cost a few hundred. Right now I'm considering developing a database app to use as a MySQL front end for a small company I'm doing IS work for, and at first SharpDevelop was my only option (though it looks like I might stick with it; it's an incredible program) at least until a VB dev environment is COMPLETELY FREE. The only problem now is I have to decide whether to learn .NET, Visual C++, or C#. Ah, decisions decisions. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but SharpDevelop doesn't support pure unadaulterated VB...)

...yes, I would learn C++ or something otherwise, but time is of the essence right now. If any seasoned Windows developers have any suggestions for a plan of attack I'd love to hear it.

Re:Coincidental that this comes up...

[Art_XIV]

I'm still aghast at the number of developers who think that they need Visual Studio, or any IDE for that matter, to develop in .NET/Java/whatever.

I'll be sticking with Visual Vim 2004, Nant, and the SDK, thank you. My decrepit mouse-wrist really appreciates the fact that with vim my fingers rarely have to leave the keyboard, too.

Here's how it really works

[His name cannot be s]

I'm suprised at how "expensive" people feel Visual Studio is.

As a professional developer, I use both VS.net 2003 and Eclipse (3.0m9) almost every day.

Last year, I worked pretty close with an MS consultant on a project, and he let me in on a few things.

Microsoft only prices the software high so that people give them a percieved value. The consulting groups then turn around and hand out copies of VS.NET,SQL Server and Win2k3 like candy at halloween.

18 months or so ago, There was an article about MS giving away VS.NET CDs at some university, and people started asking about the licensing. The answer generally was "go ahead and use it"... Which illustrates MS's position on devloper tools. Get them into the hands of the users, don't worry about making money on them.

Another effect of this mentality, is the VS.NET installer has a spot for a product key, but it is disabled, thereby allowing anyone to install the product over and over.

Microsoft will likely price the Express editions at $100 +/- $50 , and then proceed to give them away in cereal boxes :)

My 2c+GST.

Re:Here's how it really works

[Mitleid]

In that case, I'll use my knowledge of your "inside info" as my defense when the MS lawyers come knocking on my door for downloading a copy of Visual Studio .NET 2003 from a warez newsgroup.

Re:Here's how it really works

[His name cannot be s]

I didn't say you should download them illegally dumbass.

What I did imply, is that it's damn easy to get a MS employee to hand you a legit copy.

And, by the way, if the MS Lawyers come knocking on your door, tell them to go away until they get a warrant. :p

Re:Here's how it really works

[shylock0]

I agree with your post, but I think the suggested pricing is *really* high.

Visual Studio components already only cost abou $100/each (for the standard version, which is all *most* people need). I think the express versions, which really have no reason to be bundled together, are at most going to go for $25-$50. But I think its more likely that MS will just give them away for free, *or* just ship them with all future versions of windows.

Re:Here's how it really works

[skifreak87]

As a student and amateur/hobbyist programmer, if a tool costs more than $0, I consider it expensive. I just don't pay for development tools, especially since there are plenty of free alternatives (eclipse *drool*). i'm just not at a point where i feel like spending money on developers tools when I can already develop for free and I have no intention of selling or even distributing for the most part any software I write. It's the same reason I use Octave instead of matlab despite the incomptibility hassles I've run into. I'm not paying $100 for software that I'm not going to make any money off of using. And that's one of the cheaper programs I''ve had to use at school. Microsoft is smart in realizing that many young hobbyist programmers arelimiting themselves to free/dirt-cheap tools. There's perceived benefit from using the expensive stuff doesn't justify the cost IMHO.

Microsoft's Viral Licenses

[Lexicon]

I find it highly amusing how Microsoft whines about the GPL being viral, yet they release things like this; where you can develop code and applications, yet they aren't legal to distribute. This is far worse than the GPL, as apps touched by this trapware isn't safe to use for freedom OR commercial purposes. I wonder if this just a trap to try to suck in free software developers, as once the app has been touched by this IDE, it is illegal to distribute it.

Re:Microsoft's Viral Licenses

[jonwil]

I suspect that the licence is only the way it is because this is a beta version and they dont want people distributing stuff created with it.

Re:Microsoft's Viral Licenses

[ad0gg]

Thats probably the reason especially since they are packaging beta versions of their sql server with them.

Honest Reply about VB

[tod_miller]

I once used *twiches* VB and Microsoft Studio and Microsoft Office, Access et al, to write programs for companies.

Summary of my experiences:

If 99% of tasks required are 1 day jobs, then yes, you can comlete those tasks in VB, in a cost effective and managemable way.

If the tasks are more technically involved, or require more advanced security, then you should forget it!

In terms of the GUI, yes you can indeed make it clean, but perhaps many people muddy good model/view seperation with the way they program in VB (I know I did!)

Sorry to cite Java, but it is possible to develop a Java [windowed] GUI in as much time as a VB GUI, and the number of excellent and mature packages to solve almost any development task, and the simple and powerful network transparency make it a developers dream.

When you apply the concerns of distributed applications or server side development, you can only increase the advantages of the J2EE platform.

Now that doesn't say that VB cannot be used for all problems, but I believe there is a cut off point where a tool like VB no longers becomes effective, and this probably is difficult to define.

I would also like to point out, that a tool is only as good as the person who wields it!

Re:Honest Reply about VB

[Anonymous Coward]

>If the tasks are more technically involved, or require more advanced security, then you should forget it!

So, you're saying that because you don't know how to make technically involved (and/or secure) projects work with VB then nobody else can?

The limitations mostly rest with the designer/programmer, not with the language.

Re:Honest Reply about VB

[jankyPhil]

Wow... you said quite a bit without actually saying anything. Assuming that the person that weilds the tool knows and uses the tool well, what's wrong with VB (especially VB.NET)?

Or is this just more elite-programmer bullshit?

Re:Honest Reply about VB

[tod_miller]

IMHO I would have to say that there is a distinct disadvantage in using VB over Java in terms of the support for many newer standards and security packages that are available.

Not in being able to sanity check your own code.

I find Java to be more readily opened and accessible to new packages and ways of doing things, whereas in my limited experience of VB, I found there to be too much that was too easy, and too much that was too impossible.

But this is speculation, and I do not even value my opinion on VB too highly, as I have only ever spend 18 month using 5/6.

Re:Honest Reply about VB

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also like to point out, that a tool is only as good as the person who wields it!

Totally unnecessary comma inserted in this sentence. Go to the back of the class.

MS For A New Generation

[blueZhift]

I think that part of the motivation for making the beta of the so called "hobbyist" tools free is to prime the pump with a new generation of Windows developers. The full professional version of Visual Studio .Net is fairly expensive for a teenager or college student (school discounts not withstanding). So making something a free download should rope in the some of those budding programmers who in MS's view would otherwise cut their teeth on OSS tools and platforms.

Most of the /.ers here are not going to be swayed by this, but the kids are another story. A good part of the success of Microsoft and Windows is because of good tools that were well promoted. With the great interest in OSS these days, MS has to work harder for mindshare. So don't be too surprised if the final pricing is something like $49.99 and lower with student discounts and such. And of course, an easy upgrade path to the professional tools.

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[SilentChris]

"So here starts the next layer of conversion hell!"

Like every version of Visual Studio before it. You can't even open Visual Studio .NET projects in Visual Studio .NET 2003, despite the fact that the IDEs are virtually identical (save for a different version of the CLI they're writing to).

What's the big deal, anyway? Why would you go back to the previous version if you have the new one? Unlike OSs, there isn't a hell of a big advantage in going back to an earlier IDE.

corepirate nazi felon execrable doomed?

[Anonymous Coward]

so says history, much of it bad. (see also: the ill fated/alien piloted moon/mars/bars shots.)

consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... never any subscription/entry fees, since/until forever. see you there?

as for va lairIE/robbIE's fauxking pateNTdead PostBlock censorship devise, it's still broken, too.

Bait and Switch

[haxor.dk]

"We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year."

Once again - drug dealer tactics by Microsoft. Get them while they're young and innocent, then hook and and collect $$$.

explain to me why?

[Anonymous Coward]

When there's eclipse platform, why in the world would I want to use VS.NET or C#? IIS doesn't come any where JBoss in terms of reliability, features, or maturity. The only reason to use VS.NET and C# is if your retard managers force you to use Microsoft products and insist you re-invent the wheel to match what is available from open source. I have to use VS.NET daily and all I have to say is, we've been re-inventing the damn wheel for 2 years because someone decided it was better to use .NET and C#. the worse part is the copies are poorly thought out and poorly implemented. It's no where near the quality of hibernate, jboss, axis, tomcat, castor/jaxb, and a dozen other OSS java libraries.

Make money, good PR, invite hobbyists...

[stienman]

If your product isn't selling like it used to you need to make certian everyone buys it for the price they are willing to pay, rather than setting a fixed price and letting everyone who can afford it buy it.

For instance:
Take product X at $200
Remove 'enterprise', 'professional', and 'commercial' features. Sell as cheap hobbyist or student edition.
Remove 'enterprise' and 'professional' features. Sell as low end (shareware, small developer) edition.
Remove 'enterprise' features. Sell as high end developer edition.
Sell original software at 2-3x the original cost.

By taking the original product, splitting it further than it already was and spreading the price curve they reach more smaller buyers while milking the bigger buyers for more since they are willing to pay it.

It does give good PR (apparantly - it got on slashdot and many seem to think this is a 'good thing') It further gives cheaper tools for home hobbyists. Lastly, it removes some of the incentive for pirate software - if the average user can buy and download a fully supported working version for $50 and an hour of time they may be more likely to do so than searching, installing, troubleshooting, and wondering if the errors they keep getting are their fault or the fault of the pirated software.

But in the end it's simply an old method to extract maximum cash from a larger target audience, while encouraging current users to upgrade.

-Adam

Mod up answers to questions....

[gr8_phk]

Ya, my question was important, but I think this answer is much more informative. Slashdot moderation is funny sometimes.

One word.

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt, Kdevelop.

Ahn, ok, two words. So sue me. :-P

Re:One word.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, baby.

Too easy. KDev needs a slightly easier-to-use debugger, though, but the current incarnation is quite nice anyway.

Qt just plain whoops MFC's ass. I also actually got it to work (with uic and moc) from within VS, too.

Who cares about .net ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean ... we got eclipse, and i doubt any of the IDE there including those by MS can compete with its feature/price ratio ;-)

MS try to counterstrike Eclipse 3.0, but it is tool late already. Look around you, how much people are switching from java to .net ? none. How much are switching from MS legacy techno to Java ? Lots, and looking in the Java forums for VB newbies and VC++ newbies is just a proof of that fact.

MS is trying to attack Eclipse, but the problem is that the only attack they could do is to release their whole studio under opensource ;-)

By the way, the Java community is about to armagedon MS, and MS having bet on the .net platform instead of keeping its anchor on legacy solution has made a big huge strategical mistake. Too late guys ;-)

Vive le monde libre !

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[buro9]

Because it prevents the installation of the Express copies at home and using the full VS2003 at work.

Which means that I will have to carry on lugging the laptop around.

It also means that if you have a large development team (especially with people spread out geographically) that any updates now have to be synchronised across all users to ensure no loss in working time.

And when it comes down to it, it is unacceptable. It's an XML file! They could at least make a schema to describe a basic project and extend from that, with older versions using basic nodes, and newer version using extended nodes. Afterall, XML should follow the KISS line of thought, whereas if you've looked at the Project files you'll see that they tried to be clever, failed, and now nuke their work in each iteration.

It's just bloody frustrating.

Oh, I long for the days of being a Java developer again.

Intellij IDEa, now THAT was what an IDE should be.

In other news, vim is still free.

[kahei]

Those without the time to understand the various quirks of the various new forms of VS may be glad of this update: at time of writing, vim is still free.

I do approve of C# and .NET though. One interesting thing is that the _more_ someone likes/needs Visual Studio, the _less_ they tend to actually know about CLI and COM...

Re:In other news, vim is still free.

[Anonymous Coward]

oh PLEASE ..
vim is a great editor, and i love it dearly,
but you can't honestly compare vim (an *EDITOR*)
to an IDE like Visual Studio.

They're not even in the same league(though i
do wish that visual studio's text component
would take on some features of vim,
a mode-based editor is a wonderful thing)

--vat

For .NET development...

[MAXOMENOS]

...try SharpDevelop, a .NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.

Re:For .NET development...

[Chester K]

try SharpDevelop, a .NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.

And once you've tried SharpDevelop, nobody will blame you for coming back to Visual Studio. Seriously, I give the SharpDevelop folks their props, and maybe in a year or so it'll be ready for prime time, but as of today, their IDE is slow, crash-prone, lacking in features (no COM/ActiveX interop), and it will eat your code if you make changes in certain parts of your source file that the UI designer doesn't agree with. It's also infuriatingly annoying that the source code view always scrolls back to the top of your file whenever you toggle between it and the designer!

Visual Studio 6.0 and gcc

[Dan667]

I have used Visual Studio 6.0 for years and enjoy it as a development environment. I program cross platform so I get it to work in Visual Studio and then have to debug it again when I compile the code on a SUN or HP box using gcc. It would be nice if this product fixed as many of the stupid errors I make and Visual Studio will pass, but gcc will catch.

evolution stinks cos GNOME is slow

[samjam]

FLAME WARNING

When someone does gnome libs that miss out the CORBA stuff, so that it flies without taking 128MB to do nothing at all, evolution might be runnable.

Many business that would switch to avoid hefty MS licensing fee's are the sort of businesses that don't blindly update PC's. 300MHz Pentium with 128MB is typical in such institutions.

Gnome bloat that also breaks X11 wire-protocol benefits.
(Have you tried having 2 X consoles logged in as the same user, maybe one by VNC - notice that all gnome programs start on the original desktop, not the one that launched them - totally ignores $DISPLAY - how daft is that!)

Grrr. I hate gnome, the way its done is, I think, a waste of most of the time spent on it by all those skilled developers. Somebody had the paradigm hat stuck too far on their head when they designed it.

I'm not yet tired of saying this because my disgust is still not exhausted.

Sam

Re:evolution stinks cos GNOME is slow

[jaavaaguru]

Have you tried having 2 X consoles logged in as the same user, maybe one by VNC - notice that all gnome programs start on the original desktop, not the one that launched them - totally ignores $DISPLAY - how daft is that!

I've only ever tried that with Gnome 2 on Solaris (running on solaris, being displayed on a remote solaris box), and it worked perfectly. Also, I think it runs faster with 512mb RAM than KDE does. But I'll continue to run KDE 3.2.2 on my Sun :-)

Re:evolution stinks cos GNOME is slow

[Decaff]

When someone does gnome libs that miss out the CORBA stuff, so that it flies without taking 128MB to do nothing at all, evolution might be runnable.

Then don't use Gnome, use the Motif version of eclipse.

Strategy: Deluge Developers ...

[Anonymous Coward]

with new software releases:

Release new developer tools every 3 months,

Rename all Internet terminology with Microsoft-specific buzzwords,

Denigrate current Internet standards as "old-fashioned",

Hype Microsoft buzzwords as "new, latest and greatest, faster, smaller, etc."

Keep programmers busy reading Microsoft docs so they don't have time to read Internet RFCs,

Wrap everything in (Microsoft-specific) XML,

Expand the number of components, tools and complexity so that (Microsoft) software must be used to track and maintain it,

Introduce tools at low price,e.g., $19.95

Raise price later to say, $349.95

If that doesn't ensnarl 90% of developers, rinse and repeat.

Best is to turn away from Microsoft's toxic software tools and never waste time looking at them. Maintain focus on open-source tools and keep marching.

Not directly...?

[Scorchio]

But if you compile the final release version up with their free c++ compiler and libs, then there's no limit on distributing the app.

For c++ apps, anyway. Or have I missed something?

Re:Not directly...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their free c++ compiler and libs can't handle Visual Studio projects. So you can't use them to compile Visual Studio projects.

You might be able to export an nmakefile, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that this was one of the "advanced" functions they stripped out.

Failing that, you're down to writing makefiles by hand, at which point you have to ask yourself why you bothered using the VS IDE in the first place.

Re:Not directly...?

[Scorchio]

Couldn't you at least set it up a custom build tool? Then again, this is one of those useful things they'd probably strip out...

Re:Not directly...?

[julesh]

Their free c++ compiler and libs can't handle Visual Studio projects

Are you sure? I read in an MSDN knowledge base article that nmake from VS.NET 2002 and above can read VS.NET project files, thus eliminating the need for a separate makefile. Have they taken this ability out of the free version, or have you not tried it?

Failing that, you're down to writing makefiles by hand, at which point you have to ask yourself why you bothered using the VS IDE in the first place.

Because its integrated debugger is an essential piece of kit that isn't included with the free command line tools?

Tempted

[tod_miller]

to agree with you on the elite-programmer bullshit. :-)

VB and VB.NET I assume are different. Having used VB and ASP.NET [C#] I am in no position to compare them.

I speak form about 18 months of experience developing some fair sized apps in VB and macros, and so forth.

I found initially that I was able to learn quite a bit, and copy examples. However I soon hit a point where some components of the application were only solvable through some cut and paste 'magic code'.

Blame the API's, blame the archtecture, or blame me! I was certainly a less experience programmer all that time ago (VB 5, then 6).

I wrote a great bomberman clone in VB! I loved it! VB is a great little tool, decent enough, but there is a distinction between developing a good program, and developing a good maintainable program. Of course, like I said, the line fuzzes, at a certain project complexity, I would certainly shy away from VB (6.0) but cannot comment on VB.NET.

If you are puzzled with my lack of appeciation for VB as a tool for larger projects, you can put it down to my lack of experience when I used it.

I loved that bomberman game!

Re:Tempted

[amliebsch]

VB.NET is a world apart from VB5/6. The are no real differences between the capabilities of C# and VB.NET. The only real differences are syntactical.

Re:Tempted

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

If you hate VB6, then try VB.NET. It is almost as good as C#, but you can program a little easier in it. At work (we're a VB6 shop, unfortunately), I got to start a new project and I code it mostly in VB.NET (so other developers can understand it more easily) with some of the more complicated stuff in C#.

And before anyone says it, I love Java as well as C#. I will soon be checking out the new IDE that a previous post recommended over at Sun's website. I like Strong Languages + easy GUIs.

Re:Tempted

[tetranz]

I found initially that I was able to learn quite a bit, and copy examples. However I soon hit a point where some components of the application were only solvable through some cut and paste 'magic code'.

I hear what you are saying but that has totally changed in VB.NET. VB6 and older would often come frustratingly close to doing what I wanted but the final step often needed some wierd 'magic code', usually found with the help of Google's usenet archive.

VB.NET (and C#) is much cleaner. Things like data binding really do work intelligently now and there is very little magic stuff under the covers that you can't get at.

Book recommendation: Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects by Rockford Lhotka. Very good real world stuff for building multi-tier enterprise apps. C# version coming any day now.

True - VB is the COBOL of the 21st century

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

I mean that VB is ubiquitous and it works!

Only snobby purists and wannabe elitists diss VB - it's as good a RAD platform as anything else - if not better.

SSDD

[Anonymous Coward]

This is SSDD. MS has released free betas of Visual Studio on more than one occassion. Anyone thinking this portends any type of movement to free development tools is off their rocker. This is all about getting free testing, and exposing their tools as early as possible so developers will transition to the new tools as quickly as possible, thus generating revenue for MS.
This is not some nefarious plot to replace open source tools. MS already has that plan in place - they make good, easy to use tools, and provide good documentation for their tools. Sure, open source tools are great for experts and those willing to spend the time learning them - but MS has been infinetely smarter than the Open Source Movement in this one regard. They make their tools easy to learn and use - thus promoting quick uptake by students. Students that eventually become professionals, some of whom eventually become managers.
The open source movement is good at tactics, but sucks at long term strategy. This includes the advocates and users. Everytime somebody says, "RTFA", or says something akin to "People who don't understand (insert Open Source product), are stupid or lazy", they're just hurting OS. MS will glady hold that person's hand while taking their money, mindshare, and putting another little hurt into the long term efforts of OS. OS being dumb about this kind of stuff, is, unfortunately, also SSDD. OS has many products with great technical merits - but too many suffer from poor user friendliness or craptastic documentation. Most developers don't care about OS politics, or being leet because of mastery of some difficult tool - they just want to get the job done with the fewest headaches.
Open Source (at least some of it) is great. But they need to acknowledge that MS has some strengths which OS definitely needs work on. It's fine to bash MS, they definitely have major problem in some areas, but it smacks of hypocrisy when the OS moemvent doesn't acknowledge and fix it's own non-negligible faults.

VB's alright, but . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always found VB to be a decent tool to develop a quick application with, but personally prefer Borland C++ Builder for any "real" programming. You still get the ability to "draw" out your interface, but that's actually only a small part of any program of complexity. The real work still has to be coded (the part where things actually happen). When I get to that part, I'd much rather be handling things in C++ rather than BASIC. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I have more experience with C++ (though I've used BASIC for much longer. Going on 10 years now actually), but it still seems as if you're just weilding a little more power with the C++. My mind might would change if they introduced a RAD version of Visual C++ though.

hmm - I see you got modded -1 there pal

[Anonymous Coward]

must be for a slashbot-groupthink exception!

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the new project file format is XML based and documented, a conversion from the old format which was undocumented.

The reason they switched to an XML based file format is because of the new MSBuild build engine that ships with VS 2005. This allows developers to use the command line to build their projects in the same way that VS does, a huge improvement over previous versions.

VS6

[green pizza]

I found VS6 to be better than VS.Net. VS.Net 2004 is better than the first version.

Of the dozens of Win32 developers I know, most are still using VS6. It's not the latest, but it works well without being too much. Obviously C# / .net developers need a newer version... and the newer versions also have better compilers (but Intel's extra-cost compilers are even better yet).

"Excelled" (past tense) being the operative...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is Delphi now?

Re:"Excelled" (past tense) being the operative...

[Gramie2]

Delphi is currently at version 8 (.NET support only), with version 9 (.NET and Win32 targets) expected by the end of the year.

90% of my work is done in Delphi, and it's painful to have to switch to another environment.

.NET is not OLE "regilded"

[0xF1D0]

Just to be clear -- .NET is not based on COM/OLE.

I can understand if you said ActiveX is just OLE all over again, but .NET is different.

Having said that, I can say that MS has done an excellent job providing "Interop" tools for .NET code to talk to COM components and vice-versa. But the two technologies are fundamentally different. If you want to get a taste of the differences, check out:

".NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide" by Adam Nathan.

Re:.NET is not OLE "regilded"

[anomalous cohort]

Just to be clear -- .NET is not based on COM/OLE

I completely agree. COM is all about reference counting. If the number of Release calls doesn't cancel out the number of AddRef calls, then your app either crashes or leaks. This does not scale in complexity very well at all. Smart pointers and the VB runtime are just bandaids to the problem. They don't elegantly handle problems where it is unclear who should do the release or in such cases as circular references. On the other hand, .NET objects are truly garbage collected which really is the proper way to address the issue for non-realtime apps.

MS has done an excellent job providing "Interop" tools for .NET code to talk to COM components

Have you ever tried getting .NET to interopt with an MFC ActiveX control? Doh!

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the new VS 2005 project format is in XML, but the VS 2002 and VS 2003 project formats were not XML. Since they have entirely different project systems, you can't just open one in the other, though perhaps the move to XML will make this easier in the future.

Re:UN COOL, DONT SIGN UP!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, i've calmed down :)

Offtopic? Well what are you going to do if they change their minds about price/licencing terms/delivery?

I once heard that M$ were going to make products that will only work when on the web, weeellll looks like we are going that way... baby steps... baby steps.

Also I just wanted a standalone executable for home use (56k).

VS6 and WinNT 4

[green pizza]

Another problem is their update policy. With VS6, there were service packs and pathches available, with .NET you have to buy a newer version.
No free updates/bugfixes any more. At least none I could find on their homepage.

This isn't just a VS thing, it's a Microsoft thing in general. VS5 and VS6 were common during the (long) run of WinNT 4.0. Both WinNT and VS had service packs about twice a year... and a long life before they were each replaced. These days Microsoft is on a much shorter replacement/upgrade cycle. People like me aren't too happy with that, but if I was an investor in Microsoft, I'd demand nothing less!

Have you used VB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly not.

You can use VB for complex, large scale, object-oriented projects.

You will find it used in this way in many large corporations, banks etc. to provide front and back-office services that tie into backend mainframe and network systems.

Ok. So your experience of application development may be restricted to lashing a few forms and buttons together - but don't let that color your world!

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an important contribution from microsoft!

From the EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

"NOTICE: THE SOFTWARE IS TIME SENSITIVE AND IS DESIGNED TO CEASE FUNCTIONING ON MARCH 1, 2005." Also, some of you guys might be interested in this part also. "(c) Internet-Enabled Features. Since this SOFTWARE is a prerelease version, some of its Internet-enabled features are turned on by default. Those features collect information from your computer and send it to Microsoft. The default settings in this version of the SOFTWARE do not necessarily reflect how the features will be configured in the commercially released version. For more details about these features, what information is collected, and how it is used see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=25076. If You choose to install and use this SOFTWARE, You authorize the automatic collection of information from your computer by these features. Microsoft may use this information solely to improve our products or to provide customized services or technologies to You. Microsoft may disclose this information to others such as hardware and software vendors in a form that does not personally identify You (e.g. to fix application compatibility problems). This information will not be used for marketing purposes."

Firstly, VBScript != VB

[Anonymous Coward]

>Anything outside this regime, and you spend more time reinventing the wheel. And if you don't have a database backing you up, you spend a LOT of time reimplementing basic data structures, like multi-dimensional arrays, hashmaps, lists, etc.

Congrats! You are a typical /. poster - i.e. you know N O T H I N G but spout opinions like a firehose spouts water!

Why do you need to reinvent the wheel for basic concepts like "multi-dimensional arrays, hashmaps, lists, etc." when the language provides them?

Even if the language didn't you could create a class using primitives to provide the same functionality and encapsulate and reuse it!

You can even subclass the said class and even provide basic polymorphism using VB 'Interface' classes.

You're a typical know nothing!

Hope you felt good spouting about something you know JACK about!

Re:Firstly, VBScript != VB

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh! I think he is talking about VB6 not VB.NET. I was an MCSD on VB track several years ago. VB6 did NOT have hash maps and lists. .NET does but that is different. The things that made me move from VB6 were ActiveX deployment headaches and fewer (and lower quality) community libraries compared to Delphi/C++ Builder. The language was arguably the least expressive of any I encountered. Of course, you could do *anything* in it since you can talk to win32 but it wasn't efficient in terms of programmer productivity compared to other RAD tools back then. But it was remarkably easy to learn the basics, which made it popular.

VB.NET is a lot more powerful language and it is a bit easier to deploy.

Re:Firstly, VBScript != VB

[ckaminski]

Another reply has illustrated to your 14 year old mind that there was a vb before .net. And that VB was a pathetic piece of shit. It was great for building forms based GUIs, great for database access, with controls designed specifically for this. File parsing, complex data structures, PITA.

I can't count the number of times I've had to write a C++ COM Object to get around limitations in vb5/6. In point of fact, the automation aspects of VB5/6 are all that made it usuable/extensible. Without the fact that well over 90% of the useful work you can do in VB is implemented as COM objects, VB would be worthless.

VC8 Express Edition is utterly broken

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed it, and let me say that it is virtually useless. They purposely removed the resource editor, so making any GUI application (other than by hand) is thrown out the window. Second, and probably more important, they dont include alot of basic header files. When I setup a generic Win32 GUI application, and then tried to compile it, it spit out a bunch of unable to find header files errors and crapped out.

I hear you

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used VB to deliver many effective solutions where time and cost would have ruled out C++ or anything else.

You can tell there are too many amateur programmers around here - they think it's the language that counts rather than satisying the customer ;)

Re:I hear you

[L7_]

You should try giving Perl a shot.

Re:I hear you

[ckaminski]

While I agree with you in principle, if I had a project that was liable to encounter scope creep, I usually picked something else. Once I ended up with 20+ forms and database interaction or file parsing, I tended towards Java solutions or C++ with MFC. VB offered me no better.

Granted, I built quite a few applications in Access Forms (which is really VBA under the hood anyway) rather than with a full blown vb6 project.

I tend towards building web apps anyway. 95% of the shit I do is data entry and validation, and almost all of it is easily down via web and DHTML, which is where vbscript comes in. Other than being hamstrung by .ASP, vbscript has no limitations that javascript or perlscript do not also have.

Note, I've yet to touch .Net. Not entirely sure I want to walk that road...

Re:I hear you

[JAD lifter]

You should try giving Perl a shot.

This is slightly offtopic and only marginally related to your suggestion but I think that is still worth noting.
I used to (and still do) use WSH/WMI with vbscript for generic automation and sysadmin tasks on my network. I tryed switching over to Perl but the problem that I was running into was that I had to install a Perl interpreter on every machine on the network including on the laptops of employees visiting from other locations. It was a hassle. A minor hassle but still a hassle.

There were other problems like most windows scripting documentation and examples being written in vbscript and not Perl. Or the fact that Norton AV kept thinking that Activestate contained a virus. It was lots of nitpicky little problems like that which caused me to say "screw it" and switch back to just using vbscript.

I never understood...

[Brained Child]

whether Visual C++/C# was supposed to be like VB where you draw stuff out, or is MS just trying to confuse me.

Re:I never understood...

[Javagator]

Yes, you can just draw your GUI with a mouse similar to VB. Then Visual Studio will generate code for you. Or you can just write the code yourself without going through the drawing part. All GUI functionality is in the code. There are no hidden mystery files.

MicroSoft can't even count...

[rfarma5]

I was amused while browsing around and reading about these wonderful products - when I saw the "Top 10 Cool Things about Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition" here . Vis C++ 2005 is so damn cool that it has 14 "cool things" instead of just 10. Each of the VS 2005 products has a Top 10 Cool Things list, and only 2 actually have only 10 "things" (Visual J# & SQL Server), which leaves me wondering, are VJ# & SQL not COOL like the others or are they just cool, while the others which have anywhere between 12-14 things the definition of uber-cool. Don't even get me started on the use of the word "things" when you could easily use a word like "features" or another word that actually has meaning...

Lame. If you say it's a list of 10, just put 10. I doubt these products are SO TERRIFIC that you can't keep a simple list down to 10 reasons to use it. Or here's an idea, if it grows beyond ten, then lets just call it the "Top 14 Cool Things about ".

Finally, compliant with XHTL W3C standards!!!

[yopie]

From VS 2005 Documentation:
"ASP.NET allows you to create Web pages that are compliant with XHTML 1.0 Transitional standards. XHTML is a W3C standard that defines HTML as an XML document. Creating Web pages that are compliant with XHTML standards guarantees that the elements in the pages are well formed. Because browsers are moving toward supporting XHTML, creating pages that conform to XHTML standards helps ensure that your pages will be compatible with browsers in the future. XHTML is also extensible, allowing the definition of new elements. Finally, an XHTML page is much easier to read programmatically for situations in which the Web page is processed by a computer, and the document can be manipulated using transformations. For more information about XHTML and the XHTML standards, see the W3C site at www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1."

I just bought 5 MSDN Universal licenses for $350

[ad0gg]

Which includes vs.net licenses aswell. Thats $12k worth of licenses. Microsoft runs great deals, you just gotta keep your eyes open for them. If you pay retail for any of your ms software licenses, you're a moron. BTW, 5 msdn universal license for $350 applies to ISVs and is advertised on their partnership web site. So if you sell custom software, you can get this deal aswell.

Quote.

[chris_mahan]

Found in: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/default.aspx , one of the links in the post, this quote:

The Express products, expanding the Visual Studio product line to include lightweight, easy-to-use, easy-to-learn tools for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and novices who want to build dynamic Windows applications and Web sites.

hobbyists? enthusiasts? novices?

They're not going to grab many self-respecting geeks with labels like these.

A more catchy line:

The Express products, expanding the Visual Studio product line to include powerful, cross-platform, well-documented and secure tools for software gurus who want to build dynamic Windows applications and Web sites.

Now that would be something. Of course, that would be lying too.

Oh well, back to Python on Debian.

Re:Quote.

[Anonymous Coward]

ArsTechnica (for example) seems to embrace the terms "enthusiast" and "hobbyist". Its only on slashdot where dinking around with "Python on Debian" means you can pretend to be some sort of hardcore elite user. Hobbyist.

Re:Quote.

[chris_mahan]

>by Anonymous Coward

'nuff said.

Re:Quote.

[Kirruth]

For hobbyists, enthusiasts and novices, Python on Debian would be the choice of champions. They can get stuff done without being being hardcore

Think of Your Family

[awitod]

You have four kids and at least 6 years of experience? If so, I must say that your's is the most shockingly stupid post I've read in many days.

Firstly, I can only conclude that you aren't studying or keeping up on current events because your second paragraph is extremely uninformed. It's the knid of statement people were making 2 1/2 years ago when 1.0 shipped.

Secondly, if you aren't going to move to .Net you should be moving to Unix/Linux. Both of these platforms have something VS6.0 on Win32 has not got: a future. If you are the primary bread-winner in your home, please do not be so foolish as to jeopardize your family's future well being.

I've been in the industry for a long time and I've seen many sea changes. The biggest difference this time is that the economy is soft and the market is hyper-competetive. Now, I'm not saying that if you get canned you'll never work again, but I am saying the pain you feel when you find yourself between gigs and you come to realize that your skills are too dated to get a new job making anywhere close to what you had before is pretty serious.

It's a mistake I've made, in my case it was not jumping on Windows and getting some good referenceable experience before Windows 95 came out and made my ass obsolete over night. It's a mistake I've seen others make. The industry is moving on (hell HAS moved on). If you don't move with it, you will pay a price.

Re:Think of Your Family

[ConceptJunkie]

It depends. There are two kinds of jobs out there: jobs where you have to work with a bunch of MS stuff and jobs where you have to get something done. I've seen no lack of the latter, and using VS6 with MFC and the tools I've built to enhance and replace some of the more lame and half-implemented parts of MFC, I don't have a problem with "getting something done."

Re:Think of Your Family

[Anonymous Coward]

VC5/6 and MFC were such a standard for Win32 desktop apps that you're probably OK doing them for life. However, you are dooming yourself to the legacy/maintenance market, and if that ever drys up, yer fucked.

Why separate downloads for C#/VB/SQL/etc?

[hoggoth]

I program in C#, VB, and SQL for desktop apps and for web sites. Am I supposed to download 4 separate 50MB apps and use each Visual Studio separately depending on which language I am working in at the moment?

Isn't there one consolidated Visual Studio?

Uh...

[bonch]

I will say I have no interest in .NET, "managed code" and all the other well-meaning but ultimately frightening things that they are doing to the tools. I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools.

Clearly, you have absolutely no idea what .NET actually is. It has nothing to do with OLE.

Re:I just bought 5 MSDN Universal licenses for $35

[IntlHarvester]

I just looked into this program ("Empower ISV"). In order to qualify you need to:
1) Look like a software company when they check you out
2) Ship a product and have it certified for some version of Windows (anyone know what this costs?)
3) Get an employee MCP certified.

So, it's not for everyone.

As for the high price of the "Universal" package, I think MS feel they need to price it in the same range as BEA and IBM's enterprise development packages (which list for $10 grand or so). However, if you are small shop and give them a ring, they arent cutting you any deals.

You can also get the a C# or C++ only version for about $100 each -- not much more than this "Express" version and probably sufficient for many folks.

I'm scared of the Eula

[LouSir]

The Eula says "Internet-Enabled Features. Since this SOFTWARE is a prerelease version, some of its Internet-enabled features are turned on by default. Those features collect information from your computer and send it to Microsoft." Err, what information exactly are the collecting ? Your vb ap ? Site's you visited ? Hardware installed ? Software installed ? Preffered type of porn ? Is this unusual ? I'll wait to hear from the tinfoil hat crowd before I install. Lou Sir

How M$ always succeeds!

[parryFromIndia]

I bet they are going to give the tools away for a very low cost or still better - free. This is one of their many ways of killing Linux and OSS, and it's bound to be effective - More developers can afford to write software for Windows. The tools themselves are way better than anything we have on Linux - There is better documentation, better integration and productivity. While we OSS campers are busy producing multitude of Desktops, APIs, Component models and office suites, M$ is hitting hard, right where it hurts the most. This, in my book is a sad day until someone tells me OSS folks have a plan to counter.

Re:UN COOL, DONT SIGN UP!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How old are you? 12? I'd have to guess 17 at the oldest.

Firewall issues?

[easyfrag]

Anyone try to get this VS Setup file to work through a hardware firewall that is using a web proxy service? The setup file is apparently using BITS and its not playing nice with said firewall. I have installed it on my home machine which isn't behind a web proxy firewall. Oh why oh why can we not be given the entire setup file? Like they did with the SQL Express and the DotNet 2.0 setup.

DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

[callipygian-showsyst]

It looks like all that jumping up and down and sweating like a pig was, at least, sincere! Microsoft does have wonderful development tools.

PDF RTF HTML DOC...

[Anonymous Coward]

shall i go on?

Re:PDF RTF HTML DOC...

[Anonymous Coward]

mod up

I used to be a VB "guru". Now I do Delphi.

[robinjo]

I started programming way before Windows and used to do only basic. When Visual Basic came, it was awesome. I ended up doing even some pretty big projects with VB3. You didn't even notice that it was "only" made with basic as I knew how to write fast code. Learned all the ugly tricks and invented a few more while I was at it.

Problems started when Microsoft released VB4. The changes were so big (vbx->ocx, 16bit->32bit) that I realy couldn't compile my software any more. One of our employees went through the trouble with a smaller project but mine was pretty close to impossible. So I thought I'd rewrite and make a new and better version at the same time. I guess I chose VB5 or 6 at that point.

To speed up VB6, I decided to write DLLs with C. That's a lot more efficient when handling strings. What I noticed was that VB stores strings as 16 bit unicode. However, when the string is passed to a DLL, VB converts it to 8 bit Ansi. When an array is passed, the whole array is converted. It was awfully slow. Worse was that there was no way to change that. After one week of frustrations I decided to give Delphi a try.

Now I have done almost only Delphi for 4 years. Delphi is pretty much as easy as VB but it produces way faster code. The best part is that you can go as deep as you want when you want it. You can write your own controls, the object model is beautiful, and everything just works and makes perfect sense. The difference is really monumental.

When I look back, I can't imagine how stupid I was for using VB earlier.

SQL Server Express is SQL Server 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

If read the fine print on the SQL Server Express Page you will notice that SQL Server Express is that same as SQL Server 2005 except free. It includes all the new features like CLR, XML, Security, Snapshot Isolation, etc.

I wonder who they are competing with? :-)

It's very common

[chochos]

It's very common, AFAIK. I usually develop on Mac and deploy on Windows, or deploy on Solaris, or deploy on Linux. Sometimes develop on Linux to deploy on Linux. I also have developed on Windows to deploy on Windows. I have developed on Linux to deploy on Windows. Lately I have done all this with Java and .NET but before that I did it with C and Objective-C. Cross-platform has always been common and it's becoming even more common because of Java and .NET; you can even build the app on a platform and just run it on another one (no need to do a final compile on the deployment platform).

WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU USE THIS?

[yabos]

So, you take all the time to make something in this environment, then you can't even use it.

So I downloaded the web developer tool...

[hshana]

and it crashed each time I tried to browse to my computer to open a file. I'd give a it a POS rating.

Have you used Windows in the last 4 years?

[Mr 44]

On top of all this, I'm sure that since WINE is user space, you would not be able to crash your entire OS like you can still do with any Windows OS and messed up software.

How long are people going to say stuff like this for??? Maybe on win95 that was true, but have you ever used a Windows NT based OS? I use XP, and develop software on it, and have NEVER had a non-user mode crash (blue screen, etc), in years of heavy use. My main development machine gets rebooted about once every month.

Getting off topic, but speaking of user/kernel mode, since win2k printer drivers have even been user-mode, not kernel mode. And to see where display drivers are headed in Longhorn, look at this winhec slide set, lots of robustness/stability changes.

Re:Have you used Windows in the last 4 years?

[DFossmeister]

Much to my dismay, I use Windows on a daily basis. I have to use Outlook, Visio, SourceSafe, and a few other tools which are not easily duplicated via OSS. I guess I could use cross-over office or something, but that is a little fuzzy for me. I do use OSS such as OOO for word processing, firefox on both windows and linux, thunderbird, etc.

Anyway, and if you visit my site you'll see that I say that a lot, my main desktop is a Win2K box. It crashes every day or every other day. The VPN will die, then Outlook will try to freeze most everything. Then, the OS hasn't released the memory so I have 500 megs of physical memory in use and 700 megs of virtual memory in use and I have to reboot. So I am back to almost rebooting daily, just like I did with win98. And yes, this is Win2k, with all the service packs, patches, fixes and prayer that MS can offer.

I will say that XP is a step better than Win2k in stability, but there is a price to pay in speed and memory usage. I am much happier using RedHat ELWS 3.0-1 for my daily desktop needs. It does not crash--ever. It has complained bitterly to me before, but never treated me like windows.

The Big Question

[Anonymous Coward]

What about people like me that paid hard-earned cash for VS.NET 2003?

There have been very few (or no) updates for that product, am I required to buy it all over again?

It's just an upgrade, surely??

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

>Actually, the new project file format is XML based and documented, a conversion from the old format which was undocumented.

While you are correct that it is undocumented (or I have yet to see anything about it yet) the project and solution files in the entire VS.Net family have always used XML. The schema has changed between the versions but not the choice of markup.

Good answer, shithead.

[Anonymous Coward]

RTF...

[HiggsBison]

RTFFAQ

Riiiight.
I've got javascript disabled and it's gonna stay that way.

Selective reading?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing you left this out:

"This limitation has been fixed in the ISA 2004 Firewall client. "

They also seem to be reminding people to apply their hotfixes.

your crappy IDEs

[Anonymous Coward]

vim + xterms + gcc or javac is the way to go. panzies.

Also see Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

[Foresto]

They also offer a free download of Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, which looks to be a command line compiler and basic (non-mfc) libraries.

Evloution for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah we really need an Open-Source Outlook alternative BADLY! A product like that would be the best guerilla marketing for open-source in general.

Coding Contest

[Zaffo]

Channel 9 is hosting a coding contest making use of these new Express editions. Six winners get an Xbox, a one-year subscription to Xbox Live, and a copy of Halo 2 (once it's released of course...)

You mean Delphi?

[chriseyre2000]

Rather a lot like object pascal!

Re:You mean Delphi?

[Decaff]

Well, yes, and Borland/Turbo Pascal for Windows before it.

Compiling to native code?

[Hortensia Patel]

Does anybody know whether this this will still be possible with Express C++, or will it only compile to IL for the .Net runtime? (In defiance of tradition I did RTFFAQ, but it didn't FAnswer.)

Re:Compiling to native code?

[metasyntactic]

C++ Express will indeed compile down to native as well as to IL.

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

Re:Compiling to native code?

[Hortensia Patel]

Thanks.

(Jeepers, a Microsoftie reading /. at <=2. I congratulate you on the efficacy of your asbestos underpants, sir.)

I assume all the usual Win32 SDK will be included ... what about the relevant bits of the MSDN library? Probably not practical for the download, but maybe for a store-shelf SKU?

Re:Compiling to native code?

[metasyntactic]

MSDN has a release called (appropriately) MSDN Express. It's approximately 250 MB.

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

LadyBug

[metasyntactic]

I noticed that the summary of this announcement carried no mention of the new Product Feedback site. One of the most important reasons a beta gets shipped is that we absolutely need feeback from the community on it in terms of both the its quality and in terms of the features it has.

By using this site you can send us that information which will get read and responded to. These issues are read by Developers, QA and Program Managers and all of them are addressed. This site is going live with the Betas and I'm hoping that it will spread to include all MS products not just the ones for developers.

You can also vote for the issues that you think are the most important. In that way we can then tell what the community is really interested in and how we should be focussing our reasources. I'm really happy about this development because I've felt that there has been too much of a disconnect between the company and the amazing amount of people in the community. By bringing each closer we can greatly improve how well our software will serve your needs.

I hope that the developers, hobbyists, and other interested people here will get a chance to download these Betas, try them out and let us know what they think of it. You might also want to look into blogs.msdn.com where you can communicate directly with a lot of people and have full conversations about things that interest you. I've posted my blog site below. It's open to everybody and I'd love to hear back from you. It's targetted toward C# developers, but if you're interested in other things that I don't know about, I'll try to help you find a relevant blog site about it.

Thanks very much for talking about this release and letting the developer world know about it!!

-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)

i'm a student

[clymere]

i'm a student, and i think this is a great idea. As our labs are primarily MS, CS students at my school are often forced to use the terribly boated ful version of Visual Studio for our homework. We don't need the rights to write commercial apps, and we don't need a 5-disk monster of a programming suite to write a "hellow world" program.

I wonder why they didn't do this sooner. I find that when I'm forced to work under windows I use a host of other free, lightweight editors(such as jedit) to do my assignments...the kind of editors that are plentiful in the *nix world.

I suppose MS just doesn't want anyone developing software for them who isn't willing to make a large enough monetary investment in software that they are unlikely to switch platforms. I shudder to think of the cost of their SDK.

Ahh, the perils...

[Qwavel]

The perils of proprietary lbraries.

Many a developer has chosen to use MFC/ATL for C++ development. It's kind'a like open source in that the source is available and it comes with the compiler.

But it isn't really open so you get burned in the end: MS can withold or charge extra for them at any time. So, now you have a framework that is bad by today's standards, but is no longer being improved, and you have to pay extra for it if you want to use it with the new version of visual studio.

Don't get me wrong - v7.1 of the VC++ compiler and STL quite good and conform quite well to the standard. But MFC/ATL and other proprietary libraries are not a good idea. Better to use wxWidgets or something with a really open license.

No evidence of that

[sheldon]

Our company is doing .NET. We've been in contact with vendors and consulting companies such as Borland, Thoughtworks and so forth who have done a lot of Java in the past.

They're all moving into the .NET world.

I see no mass migration away from Microsoft, but I do see an extreme amount of interest from Java development shots to look at .NET.

These Express tools are obviously intended for the hobbyist market, to help build mindshare, in other words to compete against PHP and mySQL and such.

Anyway, you're simply making an argument by assertion without evidence.

Emacs Interoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame that whenever such a thing is released, people need to spend weeks doing
dot emacs rewrites all over again.

Builds with the free C++ compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been building DLL's that link to the Windows API in order to display dialogs, all with the free C++ compiler.

I am pretty much an IDE person without any MAKE experience (the horror, the horror!), so what I did was just generate a .BAT file that runs a complete build every time. Oh, and you can use VS as a guide to find what .LIB files you need to link to and what are some of the more obscure command-line compiler options. Oh, and VS is pretty helpful tracking down the location of compiler errors for those of us who are not Emacs savy.

I am just developing small extension modules in C++ (plugins to a main program written in Delphi), so building the whole thing every time is no big deal.

We are already there

[spideyct]

Others have pointed out that OS X includes developer tools.

But the latest Windows OS (2003) also includes the .NET Runtime, along with the C# (csc.exe) and VB.NET (vbc.exe) compilers. I'm sure all future Microsoft OS's (Windows XP Starter, Longhorn, etc) will include these as well.

You do not need Visual Studio .NET to build applications. csc.exe and notepad.exe are sufficient.

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[goon]

when I read this I think *outlook express*. think of all those outlook express users that switched to the commercial version of outlook. VWD Express Ed., lets everyone use a polished app, but the catch is, nothing you develop works with the *real developer* tools.

the tools are good news for those who want low cost tools to play with. but lets not kid ourselves that express is anything but a try it, like it, but must buy it MSVS pro, enterprise. right in time for Mono v1.0, the free alternative.

what about the compiler ID?

[Anonymous Coward]

how do you remove the compiler ID the microsoft compiler embeds in the application? or do you not worry about MS finding you out?

I guess if it's just hobby software it won't matter until they put in the code that contacts MS before calling main()....

Free Expires March 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the license! The free only applies to free beta-testing for M$, yeah right.

The beta is a limited trial to expire on march 2005.

Of course not, but it's not harmful

[_newwave_]

If you were experienced with the use of .net you might now that the conversion from the first version of vs.net to vs.net 2003 was quite painless. I've converted several large projects and can only think of only one minor code and one minor .config file changes that I had to make. Anyway, source code projects are usually not like word documents in which they must be used by multiple versions of an editor. The files are still text files and you're free to use any text editor your heart desires.

However, the biggest reason the projects must be converted is that VS.NET 2003 uses the .NET 1.1 framework while the beta 2005 uses the beta 2.0 framework. And this is a good thing. The 2.0 framework instroduces new class libraries, interfaces and the specific compilers introduce new programming structs, syntax, etc. ASP.NET introduces a slew of new features, including controls that produce valid standardized xhtml markup, whereas the previous versions of the controls did not. The project files contain the metadata as far as what version of the framework the project is, so they must be converted in order to use the new compilers and framework libraaries.

Re:Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Pro

[omicronish]

Does anyone know if this project conversion will also affect Visual Studio.NET 2005? It'd be plain stupid if they have a simpler layout for only the express editions, but if VS.NET 2005 also uses a new format, I guess it's understandable assuming it's to conform to new architecture or support new features.

Also, VS.NET 2002/2003 project files are XML, so assuming VS.NET 2005/2005 Express project files are also XML, it probably won't be difficult to write a tool that reverses the conversion.

for VB6 to VB.NET = Simple to Complex...

[Roman_(ajvvs)]

After using the converter for 5 different VB COM DLL's (with about 10k-15k LOC), I have to say that the converter is a mixed blessing. Syntax is similar between the two languages. Semantics and logic are however completely different at deeper levels. VB.NET has an alien hierarchical structure compared to how VB6 was (un-)structured. The quality of code can improve, but porting large VB6 projects requires re-engineering of the project as a whole. It's a mistake to assume "just" porting the code will simplify things and make for a better program. Simple code sections can be converted without any issue, but there's a certain number of assumptions made about the behaviour of VB6 and the environment, that won't translate properly to .NET. No amount of automated code conversion can account for this logic change. The entire program has to be fully retested to make sure logic still holds, especially when dealing with Empty and Nothing/Null references and the order of execution.

The Code converter isn't super-intelligent in its conversion. It has a lot of complex rules, and it gives you a lot of information about what it's doing, but some of the things it does are a combination of blatantely incorrect and unnecessary. It doesn't so much understand the code or the placement of special functions, but performs "blind" keyword/code structure find/replace activities.
It doesn't help that the converter puts a gazillion "useful" comments in the code, which it recommends I take no action on and have to delete. Luckily Find/Replace accepts regular expressions, which is wonderful (but also very dangerous) for solution-wide alteration of common strings.

The better structured and more encapsulated your VB6 code is, the easier it is to convert the code. Having lots of dependencies makes things very complex and having used non-convertible boiler plate code makes it tedious to convert whole swathes of code by hand.

If you used VB6 in the worst possible way, then it'd be quicker to start from scratch and import specific useful code in minimized segments. If you coded "by the book" (and how any of us can honestly say we do in any language...) you would have very little problems.

It is a real language!

[tod_miller]

I never said otherwise - I just found the architecture (COM, ActiveX, blergh) and the API's infuriating. (as I remember!)

Also many eeky bugs and strange behaviours. And being tied down to one product. I wrote a fairly cool game in VB! I would love to use it to teach my Nephew to write a snake game, or a bomberman game.

I like the freedom and open feeling of Java, and the instant accessibility of thousands of very cool libraries.

Again, if I had more experience in VB and VB.NET I would probably find a similar thing.

I used C# with sharp-develop, and found it ok, until I tried to do some more advanced templating and other things.

Page.DataBind is a cool idea - I hate the case usage of C#, everything is capitalised. I really find it odd coming from java world! (of and that 'value' keyword in accessors, erm, bizzaro!)

Anyone agree/disagree on the case?

Also, I lost faith when trying to synchronize some methods, it was about 5 different code snippets I analysed, none of them seemed to work, and all used different syntax, I was a bit bemused! Again this is probably related to my 6 months of C# experience only. (The syntax was also on how to lock and notify threads)

Different speaks for different geeks! :-)
(as apposed to strokes and blokes!)

Re:It is a real language!

[the quick brown fox]

You get used to the case. It bothered me a lot in the beginning, but it goes away. In fact it just might be more readable with the capitalized methods... but still, there's something more aesthetically pleasing to me about Java style case.

I agree that the value keyword is weird. I was pretty opposed to the whole properties thing (not as object oriented) but they turn out to be pretty nice in practice. For a counterexample, defining annotations in Java 1.5 is a lot weirder than attributes in C# (and I believe Java uses "value" as a magic member in this case).

C#'s synchronization utilities are actually much stronger than Java's. The lock statement is identical to Java's sychronized statement (you can't mark a method as locked, you have to put the lock in the method body). But if you want you can also handle the locking yourself by doing Monitor.Enter/Monitor.TryEnter and Monitor.Exit. So if you need to lock in a way that doesn't lend itself to lexical scopes, you're much better off in C# than in Java (where you'd basically have to write your own mutex on top of their synchronization primitives).

Java's Object.wait() and .notify() have Monitor.Wait() and Monitor.Pulse() as their equivalents in C#.

C# has a bunch of facilities (besides just "volatile") to allow you to do some sharing of state across threads without locking at all. Check out the Interlocked class, in the System.Threading namespace. There's also an explicit Thread.MemoryBarrier() operation. Last time I checked (1.4.x) there was no equivalent in Java, although the vast majority of C#/Java programmers should probably stay away from this stuff and stick to locking anyway.

Wannabes

[jaghatarjankare]

Programming is not a wannabe art, but try to tell Pusher Bill. The grunts that are left working on his miserable platforms must hate him more than ever. As many have said before, Microsoft has harmed the computer industry more than any other thing or group by lowering both people's expectations and their perceptions.

Re:UN COOL, DONT SIGN UP!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

and you are such a MAN,... AC ;)

how to download complete package

[dhanvarma]

Anybody know how to download complete package. I downloaded yesterday, but it is downloading only install program. I want to install in my home computer, but I have only dial up. I am trying to download in public library and install at home, any thoughts?