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Visual Studio 2013 Released
jones_supa writes "Final releases of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available. As part of the new release, the C++ engine implements variadic templates, delegating constructors, non-static data member initializers, uniform initialization, and 'using' aliases. The editor has seen new features, C++ improvements and performance optimizations. Support for Windows 8.1 has been enhanced and the new XAML UI Responsiveness tool and Profile Guided Optimization help to analyze responsiveness in Windows Store apps. Graphics debugging has been furthered to have better C++ AMP tools and a new remote debugger (x86, x64, ARM). As before, MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers can obtain the releases from the respective channels, and the Express edition is available zero cost for all."
Using lots of libraries and components is great... when it all works. When your app won't build and you get an obscure error message from some package that you didn't even know you were using, it's not so much fun. I handcrafted make files as well. At least then, I knew what was going on, and what depended on what.
All this value free for the express edition! gotta thank GNU, if it weren't for them we'd be milked for way less stuff.
Actually, you can thank the Microsoft's own Platform SDK for all this free value. This included a free C++ compiler, and was released at the start of this century. It was originally for MSDN subscribers, but it was released to the public for anyone to download. If you want to thank anyone for this inital free release, I think it would be Watcom C++ which was released as open source in 2000 after commercial development stopped. At the time that was a much bigger competitor to Microsoft's dev kits than any GNU software.