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Microsoft Offers Beta of Visual Studio 2005
nanodude writes "According to DimensionXC, Microsoft is offering a free beta version of Visual C++ Express 2005 among other programs in the Visual Studio 2005 Express Suite. Seems like a good deal to me!"
Where's the negative spin to this Microsoft story?
Maybe something about how they offer the first hit for free?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Second, the website that "reported" it is a new forum that has only 1-2 posts. This is a blatant attempt at spamming the site to get more members.
Nice work, editors.
Microsoft has offered beta versions of most of their previous development environments. Usually once the real product ships, they also release the compiler for free hidden in the depths of the MSDN. They do this to help promote people to make Windows Software, as some us us crafty people can't afford Visual Studios.
That, or it's just a way to get you locked into the next version of VS. Time to port all the old software!
Microsoft Visual C++ studio, where C is for crack.
Remember kids, the first hits always free.
Read the Oldnews in VirtualDub's site.. Go down to the Compairson between VC++6, ++Net2003, and what he wants.
--SNIP--
This, historically, is why I have not bothered to use MMX/SSE/SSE2 compiler intrinsics in VirtualDub -- the code generation sucks. The VC6 processor pack was quite bad and tended to generate about two move instructions for every ALU op; this was improved in VS.NET 2003, but it still isn't able to resolve binary ops of the form A+A correctly, which I use a lot. But there is an even worse problem -- note that the compiler moved MMX ops below the emms instruction. The generated code is wrong!
---end snip---
but does it run on linux?
System.out.println(syynnapse.getSig());
You can also download all the command line tools for free, which don't expire.
We all do understand that MS betas have a limited life span, right? Good deal? Well, as long as it works, but... MS betas eventually die.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yes.. All of the express bits have been free since their intial announcement about 5 months ago. These bits are designed for the hobbyist and will be freely available once VS2005 is offically released with the agreement that they cannot be used for commecial development.
While they have not been designed to run on Linux the code you write may run, and it possibly these will run to if you are determined enough to find a solution
I am still waiting for Microsoft to release Visual Lisp++ so that I can take full advantage of lisp in Windows.
It's free if you happen to be running 10.3. Unless you've bought a computer from them in the last year the price is $129 for the OS upgrade (which I purchased specifically for XCode).
I wonder why the x86 (via VirtualPC) can be emulated so well by (the former Connectix) software but PPC instructions cannot be done on the x86 architecture? I run OS 10.3 on my G4 733MHz and it's very fast and my iBook 900 (G3) runs it well too.
C++ is a popular enough language to justify the cost for Microsoft, however I get the impression that they don't truly care about C++ and would like to replace both it and VB with C#.
Horray for progress.
Microsoft is very slowly finding its direction. The success of any OS platform depends in a large part on its developer community.
With the development tools free, a developer and application base forms naturally, that can better sustain any given company. After all Linux started with gcc.
The cost of VisualC has been obscene, with Microsoft assuming win32 developers have no other option. Nowadays we've got wxwindows, QT, the bcc and intel compilers, all free (except QT) and of better quality, and ticked off developers can easily switch to OSX and Linux. Gates has acknowledged Microsoft made a mistake in not rallying a developer base around it.
Free VisualC... hmmm if they release such a thing it would be the culmination of the 'developers,developers,developers' we've been hearding of...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Coolness! :)
I haven't heard an offer that good since I ran into the Borg Queen...
'Course around here that might translate to high praise.
[insert microsoft bashing statement]
[something witty about linux]
[ressurect old joke for punchline]
[signature]
pre-emptive: If all you know about Microsoft dev tools comes from Visual C++ 6, then give these newer tools a try. You might be impressed.
And if not, hey, it was worth a shot.
[o]_O
Nothing says asshole like someone who posts obvious flamebait and cries about it later.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I've found the Intel compilers to be truly excellent -- Both the front-end and back-end of them. They do a great job on even the most complex templated metaprogrammed stuff -- code that makes the MS compiler fall over with an internal compiler error. And their code generation is way ahead of everyone else. And they listen carefully to bug reports and fix bugs on a regular basis. I've never seen a bug fix from MS on their compilers.
Ian Ameline
I think the point we're all missing is how evil Mr. Hero looks. http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/visualc/imag es/Hero.jpg
seems like a good deal
You mean, like giving away cigarettes and alcohol to students? Certainly the best way to hook people up, especially with the competition from the already-free software...
MS Absolutely Despises C++ While I do believe the MS Visual C++ product is a very convenient form of C++, and I've been a daily user for the last ten years, it would be a simple case of cheerleading to believe that MS management has any desire to continue this product. If it were not for the ABSOLUTE DEMANDS of keepers of huge C++ source code bases such as ISV's (those who produce software for resale) and some of the more tech-savvy Fortune 500 customers (those wishing to preserve the option to vacate the MS platform in the event of some unforeseen future innovation - such as an equally suitable and maybe even free OS J ), MS management would have scrapped C++ as a product offering the day that Visual Basic 6 shipped. Bring in the MS consultants or top partners and they will tell you it will bankrupt your organization if you try to use it. Consider these facts: * Proprietary languages are key to ensuring customers don't skip upgrades from one version of Windows to another. MS will always concoct a plausible new marketing line to justify why unwitting customer companies should switch from one language to another - with the new version being completely incompatible with any viable competitive platform. * All MS products are written using C++. * Dropping external support for C++ and enforcing .Net as the only development environment for Windows lets MS move in on more and more new industry-specific markets- or at least choose the players who succeed - in vertically focused (sector or industry-focused) markets.
* Proprietary development environments are CRITICAL to getting Platform/OS customers to pay for every version upgrade. Without Proprietary Development Environments, customers would leapfrog one or more version upgrades.
* For a Real-World Example: If you wrote a data access layer/sub-system against the ODBC C-API ten years ago and it would compile today and still perform better than the most optimally designed .Net data access sub-system. I know this first-hand from experience. On the flip-side, if you chose the MS language du-jour, you would have been forced to re-write your data access layer at least four times - in the same time period.
So, the moral of the story is:
KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON CODING IN C++!!! STILL THE FASTEST, STILL THE MOST PORTABLE, AND STILL THE LOWEST COST - OVER A PERIOD OF THREE YEARS OR MORE!!!
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
VIM for life! It'll increase your coding speed with 100% if you love to hjkl :)
This is free the way your tobacco company used to offer free samples before they realized that advertising could wash the minds of the sheeple.
They are intentionally supposed to be cheap or even free, and meant for beginnning developers. Like the way Delphi does it.
Generally, the way it works is that if you want to access external data sources, like a business would, you have to buy the IDE.
Visual Studio is an awful tier-5 graphical environment.
> If all you know about Microsoft dev tools comes from Visual C++ 6, then give these newer tools a try. You might be impressed.
.NET 2004).
.NET 2003 version and that they "are being considered for a future version".
We were using VC++ 6 at work. Then we migrated to 7.1 (a.k.a
The second thing that I noticed (after spending countless hours to modify the solution and project files so would recognize the source-controlled files correctly) is that the code browser has been severely crippled.
No more "call graph", "caller graph", etc.
Oh yes, the VS team has graciously admitted that the features were removed in the
WTF? I need to pay *again* to get some features back?
So, no, I am not impressed.
By the way, if anybody knows of a third party add-on, plug-in or whatever that emulates this functionality?
There was one for the previous version (VS.NET 2003) but it does not work with VS.NET 2004, is no not supported and the source is no longer available.
...is that unmanaged C++ is still the only access route to the scalable aspects of most of the underlying platform services such as TCP/IP stacks, Web Server etc. Support for TCP/IP within .Net is very limited - confined to client-app mechanisms but nothing for scalable server-side development. Same story for anything but plain-vanilla web development. The second I had to use a x.509 certificate from a bank for a program I was writing, had to go to the WinHTTP SDK, which is denominated in C. VB.Net and C# are great for the fill-in-the-blanks style coding that some simpler tasks necessitate, but C++ is still an absolute requirement for the vast majority of enterprise endeavors.
MS still achieves all its benchmarks using VC++ - they don't even use their own .Net languages when they need respectable numbers.
Doug Hettinger (dh_75032@yahoo.com)
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
These have been available since June 2004.
Personally, I've already got my hands on the full Visual Studio 2005 Beta refresh, not the lame express edition.
From what I've seen so far, they've really made some significant upgrades to their programming IDE.
If you install these things, read the EULA, which states there is a switch in the code that disables the product after March (or some time there around).