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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.""
From the downloads page "Now remember these are professional tools. This means they are pretty big files so make sure you have the bandwidth and space to bring them to your machine."
That kind of cracked me up. Remember kids, professional tools take up lots of storage space. If it's not big, it's not 'professional'.
Also - this is not open to any student in the countries listed. There is a list of about 42 schools in the US that are plugged into their student verification system. In Belgium it is 2 schools, China 3 schools, etc.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Apple's development tools have been available free of charge since the Apple/NeXT merger.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Windows Server 2003 Standard
SQL Server 2005 Express
Microsoft Expression Studio
And Visual Studio 2005 and 2008
Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
Actually, they do for academic research purposes.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/WindowsAcademic.mspx, namely the kernel.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.mspx
I see this less as about the development tools and more about the environments in which they run. MS tools are an all MS proposition. If you're developing using MSVC, then you're developing for Windows, most likely using .NET, and probably MS SQL Server. If you're using Eclipse, you're probably developing Java, and quite possibly running on Linux, and using MySQL, PostgreSQL or in a commercial environment Oracle.
This is definitely about setting the standard for which plentiful developers are available, and thus the "industry standard" which for the past 8 years has been Java.
You know autocomplete and the like work in Eclipse as well, right? There are also vim scripts that do the same thing. In fact, there are many editors that have the functionality now. I'm sure there are other features that make visual studio nice. I used it up until version 6, and really liked it. But yes, as you said, you should know what you are doing regardless of technologies involved.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Hate to say it, but there's enough extensions and non-standard behavior in Visual Studio to make porting C++ programs to GNU not nearly so straightforward for even simple console applications.
This is my sig.
Seriously, any CPU released in the last few years + 2 gigs of memory (4 gigs better - splurge on the extra $40) will run VS fine.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7614fe22-8a64-4dfb-aa0c-db53035f40a0&DisplayLang=en
The same is true of every SDK Microsoft every produced. You don't need Visual Studio to develop Windows apps.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Wow. This comes as a shock to me. Especially since the person delivering this message to me has the /. name of cplusplus
I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, for C#, Visual Studio is amazing, but for C++, Linux is better.
I like KDevelop.
1) Solutions management is better - KDevelop is much better at managing multiple build targets, working with complicated builds, and more.
2) Source control is better - that's really for any Unix system. MS source control blows compared to what you get out of subversion, just because vss uses that stupid check out model.
3) Collaboration is better. If you want a genuine team suite type of thing, its pretty hard to top SourceForge.
4) Standards are better. If you are -really- into C++, the GNU compiler is simply better because it follows the standards. If I had a dollar for every time I ported something from VC to GCC, found that GCC rejected the code, did some research, and found that GCC actually did the right thing, I'd be pretty rich. On the flip side, I don't think I've ever run into a situation where GCC did something non-standards compliant that VC++ actually did do.
5) Performance coding is better. The whole point of C++ is to be doing systems programming. That means you need to consider architectural things like integer sizes, interfacing with assembly language, and good timer calls. On all of these fronts, Linux is better. The sizeof(int) is right on Linux and wrong on Windows for 64 bit platforms.. and the calling convention and stack situation in 64 bit Linux is just better. It's almost as if Microsoft chose their convention deliberately to not be like what the rest of the world was doing. Interfacing with assembly is better on Linux. It used to be in Windows that you could do inline assembly, but -not any more- in 64 bit land, so it becomes a push between AT&T syntax versus MS syntax. I prefer AT&T assembler syntax just because it seems cleaner. Finally, gettimeofday() works really well on Linux, whereas Windows gives you a mishmash of calls... the basic SYSTEMTIME call stinks, then there is QueryPerformanceCounter, and whatever new one they through into Vista. Enough already. And I'll toss in that dealing with UTF8 is probably faster than doing UTF16 all the time, especially if you writing quick and dirty code to be hosted on western european and American servers.
6) Code is more accurate. Everyone deals with temporal data lately and that means time zone conversions. On Windows these do not work and cannot work because the OS does not consider historic time zone transitions, while Linux does.
7) There is no COM on Linux. A few years ago, I would have argued this to be a disadvantage for Linux, but, having seen the disaster that resulted from COM, I'd have to say that Linux sticking to a basic C style call for the vast majority of its services turned out to be a pretty good plan.
Really, I'd almost have to say that people who say Microsoft is better for C++ haven't really programmed in C++ enough to know what they are talking about. If C++ on Windows was that good, the world would not be beating down the doors to C#...
'Nuff said.
This is my sig.
For C/C++ programming, I have a hard time seeing how anyone who has really used VS2005 can claim it to be inferior. For all my CS projects I've had to have them compile with MS, GNU, and Borland compilers. They all do a fine job compiling code (though Borland pisses me off sometimes). However, there's some features built into VS that make life SO much easier. I still believe in compiling with as many compilers as you can to remain portable, but for a development environment VS2005 takes the cake.
I've been using VS2005 for 3 years now, so I'm familiar with it's main features. My favorite, which I have yet to find an equivalent is the debugger. It's great for tracking down the "horrible" bugs that would normally take hours of development time (like memory trashing caused by a third-party function you're using that overwrites a pointer...). Without being able to break on a specific memory location being changed, and stepping through code, watching variables change before my eyes, the time to fix it would have went up by at least a factor of two.
Bugs are inevitable, no matter how great a coder you think you are. If a CS student has never needed to fix a bug like this, they likely never programmed anything more complex than Djikstra's algorithm. Once you've worked on a team project with at least 10,000 lines of code, you'll see the importance of a great debugger (and dev-environment).
In addition, if you end up getting your hands on VisualAssistX, coding will be a breeze. It allows you to type less and think more, which results in better code overall, and faster development time.