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Free Desktop Software Development Dead In Windows 8
benfrog writes "Microsoft has decided to restrict Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, to producing only Metro-style applications. Those who would like to produce conventional desktop applications or command line -based applications are stuck with Visual Studio 2010 or buying the full version. Microsoft announced the Visual Studio 11 lineup last week."
When I read Forbes naming Ballmer one of the 5 worst CEO, I had some doubt
After reading TFA, the doubt is gone
Indeed, Ballmer is utterly clueless on how to run Microsoft !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
what about coming up with those open source IDE's?? I understand that they have never matched Visual Studio...
You know what this story actually tells? That even FOSS users don't like their IDE's. They want to use Visual Studio from Microsoft because frankly, it is much better than the open source alternatives.
If Microsoft is so bad then why the hell there isn't better open source versions of these things??
I have recently migrated off of Visual Studio, onto Qt Creator because Creator has matured to be clearly better than Studio.
Everyone has their own needs and preferences, I have copies of Studio, Eclipse and Creator on all of my machines at work and home - Eclipse is a necessary evil for some targets, but for the desktop, I was using Studio because it was the better environment - until the last six months or so.
VS Express does, though. While it doesn't come with project templates with desktop apps, nor the header files for Win32 stuff, the compiler is the real deal. So you could, in theory, take VS Express compiler and combine it with headers and libs from WinSDK, to get a complete command-line tool chain.
Or you could just install Qt SDK, which includes MinGW, Qt Creator, and Qt itself. All working out of the box with zero hassle.
(I never thought the day would come when I'd have to recommend QC over VS on Windows...)
And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?
Maybe the fact that the price starts with $500?
And it wasn't such a big deal, say, ten years ago, but now, when Xcode and Qt Creator and Eclipse are all free? Even if they aren't as good, that's still a hefty price to account for.
Windows developers have almost the exact same problem as Android developers. There's exactly one officially-blessed IDE, and just about every book, blog, howto, and forum post assumes you're using it.
NBandroid is a noble project that many people work hard maintaining. Unfortunately, it gets zero love from Google, and as a result, support for the latest and greatest Android SDK tends to arrive about a month or two after one of its developers gets a new phone that uses it. Like Eclipse, it has some bugs. Truthfully, most of them are minor... IF you've completely mastered Netbeans, Eclipse, Android development, and the use of build scripts. Otherwise, it'll probably stop you dead in your tracks, with little hope of moving forward any time soon unless you throw in the towel, move everything over to Eclipse, and hope that the situation improves for your next Android project.
The story with Windows is more or less the same. If you have a problem building a C# program under VS10, you can find four hundred resources online to help troubleshoot it in 18 seconds with Google. Have a similar problem with something like SharpDevelop, Eclipse, Netbeans, or another non-VS IDE, and you'll probably be looking for the answer for quite a while.
It's even worse if your native language isn't English. Visual Studio is so pervasive worldwide, even people who speak regional languages can find abundant help in their own language. There might even be one or more entire BOOKS about Visual Studio in it. Deviate from Microsoft's chosen path, and you'd better be fluent in English. OK, I'm exaggerating a little... lots of the independent IDEs are written by authors in non-English-speaking countries, and provide support in their own language as well.
At one time, I would have been optimistic and said that Microsoft's future lack of free support might encourage more progress with free alternatives. Three years of Android development have disillusioned me. NBandroid has come a long way and made enormous amounts of progress, but thanks to Google's total contempt for Netbeans, it still ends up holding *me* back whenever I try using it, and there's no way in hell I could recommend it to somebody who's learning Android programming for the first time. And we're talking about a Java development ecosystem that has historically had only TWO viable free IDEs, both of which were widely viewed as the two best IDEs available, period. Compare that to Windows, where NONE of the alternatives has market share that would count as "sloppy seconds" compared to the overwhelming dominance of Visual Studio, and all of which have real drawbacks and disadvantages compared to Visual Studio.
At the end of the day, Visual Studio is kind of like a 97 year old benevolent dictator of a prosperous country who's been ruling since he was a teenager -- people might have complaints, especially if he starts getting senile in his old age... but he's been the only government anybody in that country has ever known, and not even his fiercest opponents can really see themselves taking his place, because over the past 80-odd years, he's basically become synonymous with the country, its government, and the cultural identity of the people who live there. With the possible exception of Commodore 64 BASIC, it's hard to think of any development environment that's been more dominant and pervasive within its platform than Visual Studio within its platform and era.
For C++ development, ease of use, portability and tools, Qt Creator is both a lightweight and feature packed IDE. It has about the same feature set as Visual Studio and similar usage, plus it's much easier to use and configure for custom build systems. It can be used with both MSVC compiler and Mingw. It's well mantained and has some killer features such as the locator. As a plus, it works identically everywhere, so I can get my favorite development environment no matter if i'm at work (Windows), at home (Linux) or on my laptop (OSX).
In my view, the biggest problem it has is it's name, "Qt-Creator", which i wish developers would change. Even if Qt is hands down the best library and toolit i've ever used for mobile and desktop development, it works perfectly fine for non Qt related development too, so plenty of developers writing non-Qt are missing the best opensource C++ IDE.
It could be a problem for those who believed that Microsoft and open source could be conjugated together, but this is another question.
Here it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of openness. The deprecation of Win32, the arrival of the Windows store, the bootloader lockdown, now the deprecation of the Windows SDK - the direction that Windows is taking is clear (and it converges towards the same trail that Apple are following with OSX and iOS - but at least they still give a full development kit with their OS).