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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."
RTFFAQ
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."
[)amien
As an added bonus, both are cross-platform. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Quote: "When you open a Visual Studio
So here starts the next layer of conversion hell!
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...
Homepage
***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.
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
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
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yes, it's very, very common. Think embedded systems. Think PDAs. Think mainframes.
And Borland certainly have more interest in cross-platform development than M$.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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
They have a decent UI for the mingw C++ compiler. You can package it together with allegro and some nice game apis.
.net c# (I heard this being called C-Pound in the states) ide, that is fairly damn good!
Also try sharp-develop at www.icsharpcode.net/ , a free
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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.
...try SharpDevelop, a .NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.
Finding God in a Dog
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...
Game dev and music blog
They also offer a free download of Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, which looks to be a command line compiler and basic (non-mfc) libraries.
The Express versions appear to be .NET pimping tools with anything that anyone else would need stripped out.