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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.""
But I don't quite agree with Gates here. 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. False. This is an opinion. It may be true for some cases but it is ignorance to say that any aspect of coding has a magic bullet. Even XML has it's trade offs. To say this only expresses ignorance or a poor attempt at brainwashing/marketing.So this is all around good. I like it even though it's not open source, I think it will overall help Microsoft but may also clarify student's understandings of when to use what tools. I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license. I don't find anything wrong with that business model. One step further and it could be released under a pseudo MSPL license and another step in the distant future might also entail an even more open state for their development tools. Who knows? All I know is that although this isn't perfect, it's a move in the right direction.
What would really be juicy for me to hear is what Ballmer's take is on this move. I think Gates is generally moving in the right direction but I get this sense that Steve Ballmer is pure evil. Is he seething over this move which to him might just look like lost revenue? Is he even pretending to see this the same way Gates does or is he still in the blind rage "I will f*cking kill ____" mode? I think there are rough times ahead when Gates leaves the scene altogether and I think we will see Ballmer say some pretty stupid things directly contradicting Gates' "just another tool for their belt" view on this.
My work here is dung.
I know that back in my CS days, I frequently thought about buying their suite to mess around with. The reason I didn't was simply a matter of economics. It is like crack, get the kids using their products when they are young. Then they become too lazy to learn something new.
This smells a little like Netscape-gate. It would seem that giving away (very expensive) software to the demographic of "beginners" is using Microsoft's monopoly position to affect competition in another market, in this case software development.
While Open Source tools are available for free, this smacks of Microsoft competing by giving something of perceived monetary value for free too, thus offering something with the imprimatur of "valuable". This is similar to the Netscape debacle. The only difference is that a tool such as Eclipse's starting price already is zero. But, this move by Microsoft unbalances the playing field again with the deep pockets backing them as long as necessary. I'd guess their hope is they plant the seed early enough, and corner the student market and their future work to be always Microsoft products until other tools are no longer used.
When the rest of the competition disappears, Microsoft gets to charge as much as they want. If Microsoft wants to compete like this, I wish the government would do what they'd discussed doing before, and break Microsoft up into separate companies. This would force them to compete along product lines without the ability to destroy competition without fear of losing money in the process. They will lose money in the process, but they won't fear it. And, in the long run, this is a huge money and market grab for them.
yes, sadly, even xml has limitations.
in fact, one might go as far as to say that even xml is useful. Sometimes. If it's used correctly.
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?
So what you're implying then is that Microsoft is becoming desperate.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
Also since Apple in it's infinite 'wisdumb(tm)' choice to kill the java bridge for Cocoa, I have no need to even attempt to use Xcode anymore *shrug*. Oh well.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I'm pretty sure everything you need to develop for Windows has been free for a LONG time (the SDK comes with a command-line compiler IIRC, MSDN is available online and there's windbg for debugging), so it's only the IDE they're giving free (and the express version of the IDE has been free since v2005).
And the IDE is the best I've used TBH.
Yeah, but when Microsoft does what Apple and the Linux community has been doing for years, then all of a sudden it is big news and a shitload of people pretend it is something entirely new. Which it is not.
Microsoft has given away software before to secure their market dominance, and it is not unusual for them to sell at a loss to students. I can remember $5 copies of Office in the college bookstore when I was a student, and various other "generous" offers which I could not take advantage of since they wouldn't run on my Linux, Amiga or Apple computers.
I heavily use MS tools (day job) and open source tools and Linux only tools. For argument sake lets say it costs me the same amount of dollars for all the applications/tools regardless of if it is MS or if it is open source -- I still prefer the open source tools. Obviously I don't prefer all the open source tools, there are plenty that I don't like. But those that I do like, I prefer them over their equivalent MS tools (or at least what MS would like to believe are the equivalents).
So this will likely just have the same IE/Netscape effect -- but who didn't see that coming.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It could also be that because Apple makes most of their money on their hardware, they don't need to charge for their dev tools - which are probably the same tools that they use to develop internal apps.
Just like it could be that Microsoft is giving their tools away for free for a different reason than the falling consumer confidence that they are experiencing.
However, you chose the "desperation" angle with Apple, and I wanted to show a jump to a similar conclusion with Microsoft. Granted, the degree of desperation may be different, but when you're at the top, you have a lot further to fall.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
Microsoft training tomorrow's slaves, today!
Many schools already offer MSDNAA and probably didn't bother to hook in, but either way you can go through a journey ed link to get verified anyway- though journey ed is partially slashdotted.
I have been in the industry, professionally, since the early 80s and as a hobbyist since the mid 70s. Microsoft is the worst of the worst cheapskate companies. Gates once scolded people for copying BASIC. That *is* the core of his being. He doesn't share. He's a cheap bastard, and the only way he'll give a dollar away is if he thinks he can make two more back. Bill Gates does not understand "good will" or notions like societal benefit. He's a greedy low life who'll take what he can any way he can and hire lawyers to make sure he's never does time.
And if Mr. Gates would like to step outside and deal with this like a man, without hiding behind lawyers or corporate shields, I would be the first to roll up my sleeves.
Say what you will, I AM BIASED and I do not like the man, his politics, or his business practices. There is nothing wrong with the notion that business is a member of a community and owes the community from which it benefits. That's how capitalism won the cold war.
All that has changed in the last 25 years with the fundamentalist capitalists in power. Now it is all greed. Nothing else has a place in the economics policy dialog. Bill Gates has done a lot to further this decline of western "civilization" with the way Microsoft does business. Practices once unheard of and shameful are rewarded by wall street and politicians alike.
When you think about how the Microsoft monopoly has propped up the prices of commodity software, and how much raw cash has been siphoned out of the economy because of the monopoly it is sickening.
The "free" student editions of the development tools are nothing more than a trap. You don't actually get anything. You merely get to invest YOUR time learning THEIR system so that anything you write with THEIR tools has to run on THEIR operating system which you have to pay for,
With a free software strategy, you invest YOUR time learning about tools and systems that everyone has access to for free and can run anywhere you want, including, if it suits you, Windows.
Students of the world don't be fools. It is a transparent attempt to thwart real and substantive change in the IT industry by the free software movement.
This isn't new to students who are in schools which are part of the MSDNAA. I get free copies of XP Pro, Vista Business (x64 Editions), Visual Studio 2008 Pro, etc.
Microsoft is trying to get students used to using Microsoft software to develop software, so when they go out in the workforce, they'll use *gasp*Microsoft Software*gasp*.
This software isn't free, you'll pay with your soul.
This is a good move.
They have recently also given away books, with similar goal: get as many people programming for their OS'es as they can.
Like several guys have pointed out, OSes don't sell themselves, the applications that are developed for the OS does.
[snide]Besides, students are just going to pirate the stuff anyway. Might as well win some much needed brownie points[/snide]
I know, I know! If you want to use a computer from 10 years ago, use software from 8 years ago! No need to run VS'08 if your computer was made in 1999, and purchased it in 2000. Try using VS 6, it should work with your computer and your wallet.
I'm a Computer Engineering student, so I've done quite a bit of coding in classes and have also had two programming jobs. Just some thoughts on what I've experienced:
In CS 1, they started us out using Macs (yeah, ugh, etc.) to ssh into the CS dept's Sun boxes. With Emacs and the command line java tools, we learned basic coding. When we advanced to CS 2, though, the professor decided it was time to give us Eclipse. I guess this was supposed to be a favor. Instead, I found that I now had less of a feel for how things were going together. Eclipse was hiding stuff from me, and I didn't like it; in trying to make stuff like CVS, compilation, debugging, etc. more transparent, Eclipse was making it harder to understand what was going on. By CS 3, I had reverted to Emacs. When CS 4 rolled around and we moved on to C++, my now Eclipse-dependent compatriots were left in the cold; they fiddled with various Eclipse plugins for a while, then came back to Emacs. Other classes such as Assembly and Applied Programming (C) were also best performed with a text editor and some command line tools.
My first coding job was a summer internship writing C# under Visual Studio. I liked the job but didn't like the development environment. VS seemed to hide things even more than Eclipse... I felt far away from the code. As I recall, I wasn't able to compile my stuff outside of Visual Studio. 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.
I'm still at my second job. I write C code for the Plan 9 operating system using the Acme text editor, a compiler (8c), a linker (8l), and a debugger (acid). They're good tools and they have the advantage of keeping everything out in the open. I can poke around in the source files and see all the data that acme could show me; there are no hidden properties or anything like that. A utility called the plumber helps link the shell, the editor and the debugger in a useful way. It's a rather looser system, and I have a greater feeling of control when I'm programming with it. If VS is Disneyland, the Plan 9 (or *nix) tools are a hiking trail in the mountains--cheap, allows you to go off the beaten path, the users tend to be dirty... ok, I'm stretching a little.
At last, the point! In my experience, as a computer engineer/student, I want control of my code. I want to know where things are and what they do. I don't like applications that hold my hand too much. Some of my friends prefer to have the development environment do as much as possible, but I think there's a weakness to this--they tend to get lost when something new/unexpected comes up. Even if it's just that their box got fsck'd up and they have to use ssh and emacs to finish a project; at the very least, they're going to be in trouble without some of the features they've come to expect, while at the worst, their code simply will not work/will be unmodifiable (I've seen this happen).
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
And then you get out in the real world where real businesses use MS tools. When I did my degree it was all C++ and Java and Perl and PHP and free Unix-y this and that. I picked up classic ASP and some VB on my own, and once I graduated I had a grudge against my schooling for teaching mostly theory and hardly any practical information. I've grown to realize that a lot of the learning was actually fundamentals, and I'm thankful for that. But there's a TON of stuff in the Real World that uses MS's dev tools, and really - they're very good tools. VS2005/SQLServer2005/IIS6 is something they got right, and students should be exposed to that.
- Are running it on a virus-infected Windoze machine that's already thrashing
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you want to understand upcoming trends in the IT world, you should look at what is being studied at Universities. That's all I'm saying. Students simply aren't using MS tools during their university coursework and more often than not, it is because they don't want to. Most schools already are members of the MS Academic Alliance and give VS away (at least for CS students and maybe a few other departments). Even though they give these tools away, students still prefer mostly FOSS tools.
As for VS2005/SQLServer2005/IIS6. I've used all three of those in a corporate setting and while I agree that VS2005 is a nice IDE and SQL Server 2005 is a decent DBMS, I would hardly consider IIS6 good. Compared to Apache (and hell, even Tomcat), IIS6 is a bag of crap that is only used because it is required for ASP.NET (and other MS tech) websites.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5... That's the combination on my luggage!
You know autocomplete and the like work in Eclipse as well, right? There are also vim scripts that do the same thing.
Well, yes, that's true to some degree. But any non-biased developer must admit that the VS package *is* pretty impressive. Are those features available in other IDEs? Certainly. Are they as polished, or all available within the same package? Well, Eclipse probably comes close. But plugins for Vim and Emacs? Please. They pale in comparison.
That said, I still love Vim (and I used to be a huge Emacs fan). But VS *is* a pretty impressive toolkit (aside from the fact that it's an unbelievable pig, and decidedly buggy at times).
Hmm... you must not talk to very many people, especially considering there is no VS2007. I'm using VS 2008 on an older machine, AMD 3800+ X2, and it runs fine with 1GB of RAM... on Vista even.
The latest VS releases have been very good as far as reliablity goes. Of course, that may be affected by some plugins.. they shouldn't bring down VS, but I imagine they could slow it significantly if they are poorly written.
The right tool for the right job. Or do you use the same type of paper to wipe your ass that you use to write your TPS reports?
Some people like IDEs, some don't. I liked Borlands' old text-based IDEs (TC, BC++), and the earlier Delphi ones - the later ones are cruftyjunkified beyond belief; Eclipse, even stretched out across 2 monitors, has the same problem. But that's just me - someone else might find that same IDE to be great for them. Just like there might be occasions where you'd want to use a TPS report to wipe your arse, before handing it in ...
Kevin Smith on Prince
More like about 20-30 seconds. But still, so what?
I launch Eclipse at the start of my work day, at the same time that I'm launching my browser, my email client, and an instance of Explorer, and getting started on checking my email. By the time I'm done doing all that, Eclipse has long since finished loading and initializing. I never need to launch it again for the remainder of the day.
Fast startup time is a concern on something like a web browser or file editor, which you're likely going to launch repeatedly throughout the day, but not an IDE.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Except code completion, jump-to-declaration, project-wide renames, etc, are great features to have. I used Emacs for development before, but now I use Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA, and it is a big difference in sheer efficiency. I'm not so sure that I would like to go back to an ordinary text editor like Emacs for development.
Of course, I'm no Emacs guru, it may have all this functionality, but I haven't found it yet.
Yeah I learned about power when I started work on VisualBasic Script ASP back in 1998. I used it a couple of years and then discovered PHP - where all sorts of things that had been impossible (or required clunky plugins and server tsuris) were effortless: things like file uploads, dynamic image creation, and even mail. By that point Microsoft was selling .NET which required completely relearning everything you used to know. "No thanks," I said, and I learned PHP. And the great thing about PHP is that it changes incrementally, with no one completely redoing it from scratch so I have to go back for a complete (and infuriating) re-education every couple of years.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
It doesn't take much to be better than MySQL and PHP. What about PostgreSQL and the various Python frameworks, like Pylons, Django, TurboGears, or even something heavy like Zope?
Oh, and what about freedom to run my business without interference? With free software, I don't have to trust that Microsoft doesn't really see me as a pawn.
Microsoft: Call me back once you've had a clean record for a decade. Until then, bugger off.
http://outcampaign.org/
I gave Eclipse a spin, just a few weeks ago. It was a confusing, frustrating and fruitless experience. I wasted a whole afternoon trying to get it working.
It's the same problem as any other plugin-based app: nobody cares about the app, all responsibility is delegated to the plugins. The hardest part is figuring out which plugins you want/need.
Me, I don't want to figure it out. I just want something that works. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck. Eclipse didn't enable me to do that in a reasonable time frame, so I ditched it. Maybe I need a step-by-step tutorial to learn how to install/use it... rather humbling given how I started programming back in the early 80's!
Everyone says Eclipse is awesome, and I'd love to be one of those people, but right now I see Eclipse as just another bloated unstable Java app like every other.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If there is a direct correlation between software use in college and software used in businesses, then given Microsoft's dominance in developer tools today (and the past couple of decades) then it would be safe to assume that many colleges were Microsoft shops in the 1980s and 1990s, right? I started my undergraduate work in 1996, and there was no breath of Microsoft tools then. And, talking to older students and professors, there never had been use of Microsoft. Heck, my school didn't start teaching Java until 1998 or 1999. It was Pascal and C and C++ for decades previous.
I remember when I was in college I assumed (naively) that everyone in the real world was using what I was using: vim, g++, bash, etc. It wasn't until I got my first coop job that I realized that 90% of my coworkers had no idea what vi was. Point being, the tools used in university do not necessarily transfer to the real world for a plethora of reasons.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
If you wanted that, maybe CS was not what you should have picked... Did you even google what CS was before signing up?
Varies tremendously by company. Why do you assume that your company is the only valid sample of the 'real world'? I've worked at a major company with billions in revenue and tens of thousands of employees and everyone I worked with in IT there did indeed use vim (or emacs), bash or ksh, etc. I've also worked at several firms where 100% of my coworkers have no idea how to save and exit in vi (or emacs). And one where it was nothing but coldfusion - try finding a four year degree that directly prepares you for that. Or actually, don't. .net again in two years? Go back for a new four year degree to learn it?
Hopefully universities teach people how to program. It would be tragic if they learned just a particular tool like Visual Studio 2005, because what will they do when MicroSoft scraps and reinvents
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
That's what's always worried me about getting into MS-specific technologies... arbitrarily limited lifespans.
There's an old quote that goes something like this. Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. Computer science is a lot like that fish. If all you learn in school is how to use the current crop of Microsoft developer tools, then the shelf life of your degree will be about five years. However, if you learn the fundamental basics of computer science, then you will have developed the cognitive framework in your mind for easily, almost effortlessly, learning the long list of new programming languages and tools that you will inevitably encounter in your career. That is why universities should focus on the basics and not on the toolset du jour in the workplace.
There's another reason why universities should avoid Microsoft developer tools. Those tools are focused on productivity and not on learning. So, there are all these code wizards that generate tons of boilerplate for you. This may jump start your project but you end up not really developing any understanding of what the wizard generates for you. The typical OSS approach is to avoid wizards and put the productivity boosting features in the software architecture itself.
Problem: the license agreement on the free copy forbids outright selling the output of the program (so your software house is again not a reality).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Strange, I started programming in the early 80's too, at the age of five on a ZX Spectrum, and I've found it kind of important to learn new stuff rather than humbling. My apologies though, I've never had your obviously superior skills of super-fast learning to understand an entire development environment in one afternoon. Never fear, tomorrow I will start on Visual Studio professional and I'll be demanding my huge paycheck by Friday...... Get real mate, if you were a real programmer then an afternoon of experience ain't gonna cut it, in VS, in Eclipse, in Netbeans, in whatever. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck. I think that sums it up, basically what MS programmers have been doing for years. It's a shame they don't program what they type themselves before they compile, maybe then the bug list might be a little shorter. When I collect my paycheck I didn't realise I'd got to miss the Link...Test, Recompile, Test, Recompile, Test, Recompile..... bits and it's probably why I didn't get my bonus this year. VS is a good piece of software and it's great that MS is giving this to students for nothing. I'm a mainly a UNIX programmer and as an independent coder (no big corporate backing) it would be nice to get this free as well but as it is just students again getting the benefit it looks like yet another propaganda programme by Redmond. If VS compiled code in a standard manner for many architectures and mainstream platforms then it would be almost be worth paying for anyway.