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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."
It's good to see Microsoft trying to get on board with at least the spirit of Open Source.
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).
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.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
RTFFAQ
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.
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
Now everyone can create secure, robust and reliable software.
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'.
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?
http://james.nontrivial.org
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
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...
Hmmm...
:D
:)
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!
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.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
***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
...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...
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
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....
Or you can use this fine dot NET development enviornment.
Free
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.
Yeah, right.
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
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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
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.
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. --
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
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.
... 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.
Read my blog.
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'm assuming the Visual Studio Express suite comprises IDEs for .NET, since that's the direction Microsoft is going, big time.
.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).
There are actually two free
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.
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.
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
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.
...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.
.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.
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
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
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'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.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
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!
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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
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?
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
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
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
From the installation notes for the Express web development package
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.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
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.
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
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
...try SharpDevelop, a .NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Damnit...sorry about the lack of hyperlinks
l
s vcomp/empower/default.aspx
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/competency/i
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
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.
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).
Go hug some trees.
They also offer a free download of Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, which looks to be a command line compiler and basic (non-mfc) libraries.
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...)
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BladeIP Pro Edition
BladeIP also provides options for commercial licensing for restaurants and other establishments.
Special offer: A great way to enjoy outdoors - purchase a one-weekend picnic license and get a 10-pack of napkins (also licensed for outdoor use) for free!
Thank you again, and we hope you enjoy your new BladeIP Starter Edition knife.
-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)
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...