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!"

Comments

Nice Journalistic Integrity, there.

[It's People!]

First of all, that beta's been free for a really long time. I've had it for months.

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.

Re:Nice Journalistic Integrity, there.

[nanodude]

As the author of this story I would like to first off say that I do personally know the operator of the website (www.platinumcheats.com) however I did not contact him before submitting this story to /.. While browsing his website I notice the post concerning Visual Studio and, after searching /. for a similar article I realized that no one had posted about this before. I did not in anyway intend to advertise or publisize his website or spam /. but merely to post information that I came across and felt that others would benefit from. I did not look into the date of the beta release before posting. I appologize for any misunderstanding.

Wonder why...

[Creepy Crawler]

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---

Express Bits

[Exostatic]

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

Re:Nothing new, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the EULA it will stop working after the 1st of March 2005.

Re:Not quite

[GregChant]

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).

You wasted $129. You can download XCode for free from ADC. Just need to register for an ADC Basic account, which is free as well.

Re:Might eventually be completely free

[_undan]

Comparing Visual C++ to bcc is like comparing Kazaa to ftp.exe. It's more than just a compiler/linker - it's an entire IDE.

Microsoft does have a free C++ linker/compiler sans-IDE. You can get it here.

Re:Where's the Form editor?

[atlasheavy]

VC++ most certainly *does* have a Winforms designer. You have to create a Managed C++ Winforms project in order to take advantage of it, though. Otherwise it just ain't gonna work for you ;-). If you create a native app you can still use the old-school RC file editor, although my take on it is that it's just easier to hack RC files by hand (I've spent the past two weeks doing nothing but hand-editing RC files at work).

Re:MS ABSOLUTELY DESPISES C++

[alexo]

Oh, yea!
They despise so much that they hired Herb Sutter to work on it.