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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.
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'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.
***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
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
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.
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
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. --
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.
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
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
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.
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
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
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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.
|>oug
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.
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..."
...try SharpDevelop, a .NET IDE for Windows (only) that's GPL.
Finding God in a Dog
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."
They also offer a free download of Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, which looks to be a command line compiler and basic (non-mfc) libraries.