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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."
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).
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
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.
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.
Should be on 'free', not 'express'.
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.
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!
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
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?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
For the record, that's a very good thing. Backward compatability carries too large a security risk here...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This wasn't a very unexpected development(no pun intended)
:E
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!!
May the Maths Be with you!
Or was that a joke?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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.
The compilers have always been free, or at least for as long as I can remember. This is about an IDE.
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
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.
/.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.
Most of the
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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
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?
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.
Um... "Real system development"?
.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.
.NET kills C# as far as productivity when interacting with office etc.
.net
If you know anything about
C# tends to be less verbose and more comfy for java developers. VB
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
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.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
"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.
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.
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.
.Net "managed C++" apps, which almost nobody is interested in.
.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.
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
It's a bit puzzling why MS doesn't just make the best possible development tools, including everything (MFC, ATL,
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?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
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...