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

Re:I thought this was slashdot?

[WasterDave]

Where's the negative spin to this Microsoft story?

I'll raise you a positive Apple spin? Xcode is free. Always has been. We're not talking xcode "lite" or "express" either, this is the full biscuit - the same thing they use in house. Plus all the lovely performance tools.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Where's the Form editor?

[Javagator]

Microsoft has adapted C++ to .Net with the same skill and elegance that they used when they adapted C++ to COM. In other words, it's a mess. I have programmed in both C# and managed C++ and its easier for an experienced C++ programmer to learn C# than managed C++. Even Microsoft realizes their mistakes and are correcting some of them in C++ 2005 (the beta is essentially 2005). The main advantage of C++ .Net is that it will be easier to port over existing C++ applications. New development should be in C#.

MS ABSOLUTELY DESPISES C++

[was_ms_now_linux]

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!!!

Evil: compilation's errors!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Metrowerks's CodeWarrior v9 for Windows $499 is a powerful tier-1 compiler, debugger and & IDE.

Visual Studio is an awful tier-5 graphical environment.

One More Key Fact About C++ and VB and C#...

[was_ms_now_linux]

...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)