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

Re:Difference between this and full version

[jeff67]

RTFFAQ

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."

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!

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...

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: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: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?

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: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!

[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...