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:Professional Tools

[CRCulver]

Remember kids, professional tools take up lots of storage space.

Well, once upon a time the GNU tools used to be installed more often from disks or tapes you bought from FSF than downloaded, because of what at the time were large file sizes. And the printed Emacs manual is a 600-page behemoth. So, it's not as if the Free Software movement has always remained free from claims of heftiness or outright bloat.

Re:Almost Thar ... Stay on Target!

[link5280]

MS has a superior IDE with Visual Studio as compared to most, but I agree the underlying language is no different then any other.

Re:Professional Tools

[sundarvenkata]

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.

Come Again?

[eldavojohn]

Having developed for years in Linux using various dev tools, I have to say that Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment is amazing compared to most open source tools I've had experience with. Wow. This comes as a shock to me. Especially since the person delivering this message to me has the /. name of cplusplus.

Help me out here, I have a Pentium III 877Mhz processor machine with about a half gig of DDR ram that I purchased in 2000. It still runs fine. For some reason when I install Visual Studio on the Win XP partition, it does not work so well. As in, it is barely usable for small applications and hangs indefinitely for large projects I have. Yet when I write a C++ application in the Linux partition using a number of various open source editors that utilize GCC, it works quite well. I don't mean just VI or Emacs, I mean several things including Gnome and KDE graphical editors (like Glade & KDevelop).

So tell me, what am I doing wrong? Several people have instructed me to buy a new computer but for some reason I do not think that I should have to buy a new computer every time a new version of Visual Studio comes out.

Re:Come Again?

[everphilski]

Linux won't run on my Windows Mobile enabled phone, but Windows Mobile will! What the fuck is wrong with linux?

That pretty much sums up your post.

Try comparing Glade or KDevelop to Visual Studio, even the free-for-all Express Edition, on a technical level and then we can talk. I develop for both Windows and Linux, but I got to say, I prefer both Microsoft's compiler and IDE.

Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse

[kjkeefe]

I bet they are giving Visual Studio away to everyone within 2 years. They can feel their developer market share slip and they are not stupid.

Having recently attended a top 5 CS department university, I can tell you that most students are developing in linux. Windows development (.NET to be specific) is only done by about 15% of students (my guess) and it is NEVER used in courses. Course projects that require UI's use Java. Otherwise, it is written in C, C++, Java, oCaml, Scheme, Perl, and PHP. I've taken upwards of 40 CS classes in the last 8 years and I have NEVER used Microsoft tools for coursework.

Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse

[SnprBoB86]

I attend a Drexel university, which is a co-op school. We primarily use Linux and open source software in the CS department, so there are a lot of students who prefer Linux. Most students don't even realize they can get tons of MSDNAA stuff for free.

However, a great deal of students go out on co-op and come back with skills in Visual Studio and Microsoft technologies. No one teaches these students how to use vim or emacs. These people were writing code in Eclipse or gedit before Visual Studio. You'd be hard pressed to convince them to switch away from Visual Studio after a 6 month co-op using it. It is far from perfect, but it is a great product and is used happily by many.

The real issues stem from the close minded cultural and social attributes of most professors I know. Nearly every CS class I sit through includes the instructor making at least one Microsoft bashing comment. There isn't really so much as a preference for FOSS tools as there is social pressure and general ignorance of the MSDNAA and Express editions.

Re:Professional Tools

[trolltalk.com]

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.

For me, its command-line prompt in bash to compile from, syntax-highlighting editor (vim or kate) to code with, and the lamp stack to deploy on. Make, grep, some perl-fu, svn if you want to have a repository - it might not be "integrated", but it IS a great development environment, and VERY customizable.

The latest version of eclipse starts up fast enough if you have a couple of gigs of ram ... it just doesn't offer me what I want/need (yes, I know it can "sort of" handle c/c++, but I find it STILL gets in the way).