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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?
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.
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."
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?
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
As a DOT NET developer, I use MS VS. Why not? I love the autocomplete and the list of Properties and Events for each control once I type the name of the control. Makes me look like a wizard when the boss is watching me code (urk) and I toss in a SqlDataSource, a DropDownList, type "ddlGetStates." and select Databind, save, alt-tab, refresh BAM!!! States DDL... (ok, before you mod me MS Fan-boi, keep reading...)
But then I go home, and having thought of a great feature on the drive home, I FTP into my site, open with a text editor, (insert notepad/BBedit/eMacs/Vi here to taste), and write the code by hand. Even if that means copying an pasting, I... how shall I say this... ***still have to know what I'm doing***. Yeah, all you n00bs, you drag and drop those controls and use F4 to set the properties...Go 'head...
But the minute you have to do that with your ARMPIT, you are sunk. I took a written (the process of leaving graphite trails on paper) test for ASP.NET once... Unless you know what your are doing, you are screwed. Use whatever tools you want, whatever LAMP/.NET. But make sure you learn what you are doing, and not just doing.
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.
My work here is dung.
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
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!
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.
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