Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Offering Free Windows 10 Development Environment VM for a Limited Time (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the free-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is providing a free virtual machine that comes preloaded with Windows 10 Enterprise, Visual Studio 2017, and various utilities in order to promote the development of Universal Windows Platform apps. Before you get too excited about a free version of Windows 10 Enterprise, this Virtual Machine will expire on January 15th 2018. When downloading the development environment, you can choose either a VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, or Parallels virtual machine depending on what virtual machine software you use. Each of these images are about 17-20GB when extracted from the downloaded archive and include almost everything you need to develop Universal Windows Platform apps.

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Not my cup of tea by eneville · · Score: 1, Troll

    17GB, really, what's included in this compiler and lousy OS that bloats it this badly? Has MS gone into cahoots with Seagate in addition to Intel?

    I got sick of all the junk you had to add onto a Windows install in the 90's to make it usable that I switched OS to linux. This was partly as the software installs were on multiple CD ROMs and evenings were lost swapping install media. Yet somehow a free OS provided all that I needed in a single command (apt-get install make patch gcc ...) I suddenly saw the light and was able to get on with my coding and using the computer without having to visit multiple download sites.

    Yes, chocolatey have done some fine work, this this is too little, too late. We've had great package management in linux for so long now and MS has only just found a way to distribute an OS and compiler (but at 17GB!?), what a joke.

    --
    Why UNIX?
  2. Re: Why? by Darinbob · · Score: 1, Troll

    Agree and disagree. There is absolutely a need to develop applications; they should not all be on the web. But This "Universal" framework is not universal, it doesn't support Windows 8.1, 8, 7, or XP. Much less OSX, BSD, or Linux. It is yet another way to try and lock users and developers into a shrinking platform, and also an attempt to yet again force upgrades to Windows 10 that the market has already decided it does not want to do voluntarily.