Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.