Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students

beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students. "The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""

Comments

Re:As it happens...

[NMagic]

Nope, I'm not "implying" anything. I said what I meant. Apple has a very limited software library. They probably released their dev tools because they are desperate for SOMEBODY to be able to write software. Apple and MS are in very different situations, and my statement re: apple has nothing to do with MS.

Re:Professional Tools

[sundarvenkata]

Sir, I am now enlightened. Eight different tools to accomplish a task is the dream of every employee on a project deadline.

Re:Come Again?

[Tony]

Visual Studio is a pig, but the benefits of it far outweigh the cost of upgrading your old broke-ass computer every few years.

Benefits? Oh, I don't think so.

In MNSHO, VS is a piece of shit. It's OK for beginning programmers, or for people who churn out lame-assed GUI-centric MS-Windows software, but for big or complex projects, it fucking blows. It's only OK if you want to code like Microsoft has decided you should code.

Otherwise, it's a straitjacket.

Re:Professional Tools

[Digi-John]

Code completion is a crutch and not particularly helpful: "oooh look a menu of stuff to scroll through and select the right function!"... now honestly, was that any faster than just typing the damn function? If your function names are so long that you really need completion, you should rethink your naming scheme. Jump-to-declaration--sounds like ctags to me. As for project-wide renames, learn sed, my friend.

Re:diving into the bits

[dedazo]

As I recall, I wasn't able to compile my stuff outside of Visual Studio.

That's interesting, I've coded entire C# applications using nothing more than vim, the NT console and a NAnt script. If you prefer of course you can just use the C# compiler directly, but I don't see why you would do that. Don't like NANt? Use scons or any other build system. All the .NET tools are command line applications. Unit testing? Nunit ships with both a graphical and command line interfaces as well. So you recall incorrectly.

The super tight integration just didn't work for me. VS struck me as the Disneyland of development tools--flashy, costly, structured; all your lodging (repositories), activities (coding), eating (compilation?), etc. are all right there.

This might come as a surprise to you, but in the real world most developers who value productivity find this to be an advantage. We don't call it "flashy", we call it "useful". If you don't, however, you can just use Notepad and the command line. Need to debug? Sure, there's cordbg, which has that 1337 command line flavour, or the SDK ships with a fairly decent graphical debugger as well.

Total cost to write .NET applications: $0. Hell, you can even download the free Express editions of VS.NET and still pay nothing. What is "costly" about all this again?

Pretending to have cred by slagging a product you probably don't understand and claiming a text editor is "better" because you've obviously never had to work in a real software project really doesn't fly. Well, except around here I guess.

No Professional Tools are from Redmond

[SgtChaireBourne]

All the "First taste is free" comments apart, can some slashdotters recommend an equivalent in the open source software that is as mature and robust as the three said software listed in the page. A *real* development environment, designer tools and a server are given away free by a corporation and suddenly some geeks want to comment on how this is not what they want and Windows source would be the holy grail.

Judging from some of the activity here, that's probably not a serious question. But let's pretend it is. However, a lot of little Bill fans will get their feelings hurt.

Bill's toy bag is just that, a toy bag, that what little it does is on and for Windows -- only. And it's near a few decades late in coming. A comprehensive answer could go on for pages if you start to include various languages like Java, Python, Perl, C, and Ada. or Tomcat, Lenya, Swish, and many others staples. That's not even counting PHP and PHP-based kit, CPAN and others.

However the press release does not say what the MS "tools" do or, more correctly, claim to do. Students would be more employable playing WoW. For those that have been living in a cave for the last 15 years here's a recap of the main professional tools you will find in industry. There are others, but they're mostly open source, too, except a few big items like Oracle and DB2. None are MS.

IDEs

• Netbeans
• Eclipse
• Emacs - it's underrated
• Kdevelop - it's also underrated

Databases

• MySQL (now Sun)
• Postgresql

GUI toolkits

• Qt (now Nokia)
• GTK+
• wxWidgets

MS has held back computing far too long. The sooner it gets out of the way, the sooner both business and research can get back on track. Bill and his anti-American movement can go take a hike, there's no place for either MS or MS boosters in today's economy.