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Microsoft Offers Beta of Visual Studio 2005

Posted by timothy on from the decorate-your-hospital-room-for-free dept.

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!"

7 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing new, really. by shufler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Nothing new, really. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      They definately do lock you in, it expires after a certain amount of time.

  2. Where's the Form editor? by SamNmaX · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Please correct me if I'm wrong, but why, oh why, does Visual C++ still not have a form editor like Visual Basic or Visual C#? Sure, it has the dialog editor, but does that's not even close to the same thing. This is something Borland supported quite a while ago with Borland C++ Builder, and was fairly nice.

    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.

  3. Might eventually be completely free by mnmn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Might eventually be completely free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The price of the entire suite is nothing compared to the price of a programmer to use it.

  4. zerg by Lord+Omlette · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:Wonder why... by rjshields · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the code generation sucks

    That's not really the most important part of an IDE for most people. Things like code refactoring, auto-completion and hints, integration with documentation and source control and general text editing capabilities are probably higher on people's IDE wish list. Besides, the compiler is a part that can be changed if required.

    --
    In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.