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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."
This isn't a dumb decision at all. It's the consequence of a dumb decision. VS Express was put out to get people to switch to .NET development. Now that they're trying to shift from .NET to WinRT or whatever it's called this week, the tools aren't needed any more but the WinRT versions are. Look further down the stack and this change makes sense in a Microsoft way.
There is no reason you have to release your code under the GPL if you use the Qt libraries. Qt is licensed under the LGPL.
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
Windows 8 WDK won't include one. Neither will the Windows 8 SDK.
It seems like with this move and generally the Metro and Windows 8 walled garden stuff, Microsoft is going more and more "the Apple way". Is it really in their best interest? Is it just me, or hasn't the open-ish (compared to Apple) Intel + Microsoft Windows ecosystem served a desktop market niche that is different from the Apple universe? Does Microsoft have an exit strategy in case they fail in closer competition with Apple at Apple's game?
The Qt SDK has an option to be used with LGPL v 2.1 which will allow developers to release proprietary executables without being required to release their source code. Source release is only required if the developers make changes to the Qt SDK itself, which usually shouldn't be an issue. There's also a commercial license available if even this is too onerous.
You are forced to release your software as GPL if you use the QT sdk tough.
No you aren't. Get your facts straight.
Because Microsoft controls the APIs and can release new versions of Visual Studio simultaneously with the new releases of Windows? Because anybody who wants to do an open IDE for Windows has to wade through the craptastic Microsoft documentation to be a year behind the curve, right about time for the next set of API changes?
Too many windows fanboys/paid flacs have Slashdot accounts these days and mod anything that has legit criticism of MS products down...I've been watching this happen for the past little while here...and I would not be suprised if many of the IP address of those moding down post that are critical of MS come from Microsoft campuses or those employed by MS.
Not quite; note the time of the article and the time of the first post. Yes, even beating out the first post trolls. Here, let me repeat that just to make sure it doesn't get lost in other sentences:
That post beat out the first post trolls.
We've had an infestation of not-at-all-subtle paid Microsoft shills with ready-made posts like that in here for a while, desperate to astroturf wherever they can. The mods are going to downvote them to oblivion, simple as that. It's just that there's no "-1 Spam" or "-1 Shill" mod, so "-1 Troll" is the closest we've got.
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.
Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox, .Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions. Dominant in most large corporations for email as well. They've done some good things, they've done some bad things like all companies. In pure business sense they are doing pretty good: http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/earning_yield#series=type:company,id:MSFT,calc:earning_yield&zoom=&startDate=6/30/2002&endDate=5/25/2012&format=real&recessions=false earnings yield went from ~1.75% to ~10% since 2002 (couldn't get a chart out to 2000 when Gates left) while they traded ~flat since the dot com boom. So MS today has the earnings to back up the valuation versus MS of Gates day. They might have boggled the phone, screwed the pouch with Vista etc but they earn money, at least now. Consumer software isn't the only source of revenue.
I think CEOs that need to be crapped on are the ones that gave them selves bonuses when they were getting government bailouts and losing money. Or the second they got out of government ownership decide to reward themselves with 10's of millions as deferred payment for all those hard years of ~1M/yr salaries.
The problem here is the TV problem. Visual Studio 11 is free to use, but not free to produce. You're not the customer, you're the product that Microsoft is buying. And Microsoft wants you to produce metro applications, that drive demand for their new products (and phones/tablets), not drag users back to their previous products that people have already bought.
It's as simple as that.
Don't like being used ? Pay for what you need. It'll be a whole other story, even with the very same Microsoft products.
Btw: as a developer I thought I'd add that Visual Studio is a fast, usable and well-integrated IDE, it's also a very, very industrial one. It is much less elegant than most of the alternatives.
And is there any actual reason for why you would not pay for Visual Studio?
You know that among modern OSes, Windows is unusual in that it doesn't come with a compiler as a standard feature.
You don't have any actual point apart from "I don't want to pay for the tools I use to get money".
If there's one thing Microsoft is smart about, it's that they try to please developers. People developing software that runs on Windows is good for Microsoft. It gives others a reason to want to use Windows. How many people are unable to fully switch to Linux (but would like to) because some software they must use is Windows-only?
This decision by Microsoft means that, up until now, Microsoft has considered such effects to be valuable enough to justify giving away Visual Studio. Now they are asking for money in addition to this effect. Complaining and trying to convince Microsoft to change their minds is standard haggling.
Besides which, not everyone who programs on Windows is selling the software they produce. Some of them are developing FOSS. They would naturally be more reluctant to pay than someone who is actually engaged in a commercial use and considers it a cost of doing business.
What part of this is so absurd to you?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
People here are "crying" because Microsoft has stopped providing an official way for building native Windows applications without paying money. This is the news. The fact that there might be alternate development environments (which will always lag behind the official ones, even if you pay 1E+9 $ for them) or that you could hack your way into compiling a native application by extracting some compiler binary from some other Microsoft product (legally?) is completely secondary. What we are discussing here is this clear decision from Microsoft, whether you see it as a "fault" or not.
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.