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

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

Posted by msmash on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @08:10AM 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.

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First! by Archangel+Michael · 2017-11-21 08:12 · Score: 3, Funny

First Hit is free!

--
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
1. Re: First! by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-11-21 09:18 · Score: 2
  
  Your dad I hope. It would be pretty inappropriate to talk about your Mother that way.
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
2. Re:First! by Archangel+Michael · 2017-11-21 10:08 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Okay, so, nobody gets my joke about giving away drugs. I guess I'm the old greybeard I used to mock. Sigh.
  
  --
  Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
3. Re:First! by ilsaloving · 2017-11-21 11:15 · Score: 2
  
  *raises hand* I did!
  Unfortunately it looks like a clan of trolls got to you first.
4. Re:First! by Opportunist · 2017-11-21 20:39 · Score: 1
  
  They got it all right, they were just butthurt that they couldn't downvote a "first!" post as offtopic because it actually, for once, wasn't.
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 08:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

I am an accomplished Windows 10 UWP developer, and there are no jobs for this. There are about 1000% more web technology jobs, so I'm shifting my focus to WebAPI and front-end HTML client development. At least there are jobs there. You're wasting your time studying UWP. There are no jobs.
1. Re:Why? by SQLGuru · 2017-11-21 08:29 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  With Visual Studio Enterprise, you can easily build .NET Core apps with a nice web framework (Angular? React? etc.) in front of it. Of course, January 18th isn't very long......
  But really with Community Edition or Visual Studio Code (both free), you can build a nice .NET Core app with a web framework (Angular, React, etc.) in front of it.......and you don't have to worry about your environment expiring.
2. Re: Why? by Darinbob · 2017-11-21 08:56 · 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.
3. Re: Why? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2017-11-21 09:01 · Score: 1
  
  But This "Universal" framework is not universal
  And there's no actual windows in the system, right? Two out of three...I wonder if it's even a platform. ;)
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
4. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 09:07 · Score: 1
  
  Not only are there no jobs, but Microsoft pissed off everyone who was doing WPF and Silverlight at the time UWP was created. There will NEVER be jobs for UWP. The platform is closed and sloppy. Even Windows developers take a pass. It was a political creation so now it must die.
5. Re:Why? by Altrag · 2017-11-21 09:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  This is MS' own fault. They've built up a long history of developing new technologies and paradigms.. only to abandon them 2 or 3 years later and leave anyone who spent the time learning the system in the dirt. WPF, Silverlight and XNA are three that I at least was looking at at one point but they were already abandoned practically before I could get the time to learn how to use them. UWP is almost certain to go the same way, especially given that its major draw is seamless(ish) transition from desktop to mobile, and Win10 mobile is somewhere between questionable and dead itself already.
  They really need to just decide on a direction and stick to it. Or at least commit to (properly) supporting it for at least 10-20 years. Waffling back and forth between wanting to target web platforms and wanting to target mobile platforms every 2 or 3 years just means that nothing ever gets completed and developers don't have the time to get a solid foothold on any technology before its abandoned and replaced with something else.
  Meanwhile competing platforms that have retained focus are still going strong (take objective-C as an example. For all its ugliness, its a pretty good tech to know right now purely due to the fact that Apple has kept strong on using it for iOS development over the years and iOS doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.)
6. Re: Why? by Austerity+Empowers · 2017-11-21 09:49 · Score: 2
  
  not to mention that both linux and os x have better development environments. All this is going to do is remind us of 1999 and why we hated programming for windows.
7. Re:Why? by r2rknot · 2017-11-21 09:56 · Score: 1
  
  No mod points, so. I agree!
  
  --
  "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
8. Re: Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 10:10 · Score: 1
  
  You have it all wrong. The entire purpose is to ensure a revenue stream for Microsoft. Once you get sucked into using their shit, you have to buy it all over again every six months when they make a newer deliberately incompatible version that does not work on their newly updated OS.
9. Re:Why? by OldMugwump · 2017-11-21 10:33 · Score: 1
  
  And I should care there are no jobs...why? I don't write software because people pay me to. I write software because I want the software that I write.
  
  --
  "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
10. Re:Why? by gweihir · 2017-11-21 10:46 · Score: 1
  
  That is really interesting. Another failed MS API?
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
11. Re:Why? by ilsaloving · 2017-11-21 11:18 · Score: 1
  
  I think they should try harder to target javascript developers. They're used to throwing away everything they learned and switching to a completely different framework on a yearly basis.
12. Re:Why? by sg_oneill · 2017-11-21 12:05 · Score: 1
  
  Meanwhile competing platforms that have retained focus are still going strong (take objective-C as an example. For all its ugliness, it's a pretty good tech to know right now purely due to the fact that Apple has kept strong on using it for iOS development over the years and iOS doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.)
  Apple has kind of abandoned ObjC. Its all about swift now. Well kind of. Objective C is still developed, just not with the same focus.
  Which is a shame, because, despite its initially confusing syntax, it's a great little language, achieving the OO C++ was designed to achieve with none of the headaches.
  
  --
  Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
13. Re:Why? by ChunderDownunder · 2017-11-21 14:38 · Score: 1
  
  They needed to make UWP a first class citizen on Android, either by making it simple to publish on Google Play or providing an Android front end to the Windows Store. Isn't that why they bought Xamarin?
  Only now are they pushing integration between Windows 10 and Android via a custom launcher and Edge browser.
14. Re: Why? by MoarSauce123 · 2017-11-22 00:03 · Score: 1
  
  Then how come that essentially all development environments are modeled after VisualStudio? I'm no Microsoft fanboi, but the dev tools are quite good. VS is the best product Microsoft has, although it should be less buggy....but who bothers with QA these days and fixes bugs when new buggy features can be stuffed in?
15. Re:Why? by Hal_Porter · 2017-11-22 00:18 · Score: 1
  
  The odd thing is that Microsoft have being doing this since Win32
  Post Win32 you had MFC which I spent a lot of time learning, only to eventually go back to Win32.
  Then there was .Net, WinForms, Windows Presentation Framework/Avalon, Metro, Windows RT. Anyone who adopted one found it deprecated in a year or two. As Joel On Software put it
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
  
  Now Microsoft has so many developers cranking away that it's not enough to reinvent the entire Windows API: they have to reinvent it twice. At last year's PDC they preannounced the next major version of their operating system, codenamed Longhorn, which will contain, among other things, a completely new user interface API, codenamed Avalon, rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of modern computers' fast display adapters and realtime 3D rendering. And if you're developing a Windows GUI app today using Microsoft's "official" latest-and-greatest Windows programming environment, WinForms, you're going to have to start over again in two years to support Longhorn and Avalon. Which explains why WinForms is completely stillborn. Hope you haven't invested too much in it. Jon Udell found a slide from Microsoft labelled "How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and Avalon?" and asks, "Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?" A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer.
  So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got .NET, in several language flavors, and don't get too attached to any of that, because we're making Avalon, you see, which will only run on the newest Microsoft operating system, which nobody will have for a loooong time. And personally I still haven't had time to learn .NET very deeply, and we haven't ported Fog Creek's two applications from classic ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET because there's no return on investment for us. None. It's just Fire and Motion as far as I'm concerned: Microsoft would love for me to stop adding new features to our bug tracking software and content management software and instead waste a few months porting it to another programming environment, something which will not benefit a single customer and therefore will not gain us one additional sale, and therefore which is a complete waste of several months, which is great for Microsoft, because they have content management software and bug tracking software, too, so they'd like nothing better than for me to waste time spinning cycles catching up with the flavor du jour, and then waste another year or two doing an Avalon version, too, while they add features to their own competitive software. Riiiight.
  No developer with a day job has time to keep up with all the new development tools coming out of Redmond, if only because there are too many dang employees at Microsoft making development tools!
  
  --
  echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Excited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 08:16 · Score: 3, Funny

Before you get too excited about a free version of Windows 10 Enterprise, this Virtual Machine will expire on January 15th 2018.

I will try to contain my excitement about this.
1. Re:Excited? by cfalcon · 2017-11-21 12:38 · Score: 1
  
  lol do you think you can even actually get a permanent license? I don't even think that they actually SELL enterprise. It's the one version you can turn off the spying legitimately, so I think you need some huge number of minimum orders and contract or something?
Jesus Christ! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 08:24 · Score: 4, Funny

How offten do we have to say NOOOOO to your Free-as-in-Herpes-Windows-10??! You couldn't give it away as a full version, why would anyone want a timebombed version?!
captcha: stuffs. yes, really, please to, ms...
1. Re:Jesus Christ! by Altrag · 2017-11-21 09:48 · Score: 1
  
  Its about promoting UWP more than promoting Win10 in this case I'm pretty sure. Its also a virtual machine so its not replacing your day to day life like the forced free "upgrade," so there's not much to complain about here. If you aren't interested in UWP development then don't download it.
2. Re:Jesus Christ! by gweihir · 2017-11-21 10:44 · Score: 2
  
  Hahahah, nice. "Free as in Herpes" is something I have to remember.
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
3. Re:Jesus Christ! by Opportunist · 2017-11-21 20:43 · Score: 2
  
  But UWP is even WORSE than Windows 10 by itself. You can only create Win10 applications with it. Now who the hell would want to do that? It's like writing mobile apps for Nokia's OS the name of which I even forgot by now because it's so insignificant that it's not worth remembering.
  Why the FUCK would anyone want to develop for a platform that is about as well received as the aforementioned herpes?
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
call it what it is.. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 08:25 · Score: 2, Insightful

it's a TRIAL
1. Re:call it what it is.. by xxxJonBoyxxx · 2017-11-21 08:49 · Score: 1
  
  ...which makes this "story" a Slashvertisement.
  
  It feels like the DNC picked the editors around here lately: they kind of lean left but they're tone-deaf to the community.
2. Re:call it what it is.. by Opportunist · 2017-11-21 20:44 · Score: 1
  
  ...and error...
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not my cup of tea by eneville · 2017-11-21 08:30 · 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?
Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine by caseih · 2017-11-21 08:36 · Score: 5, Informative

I've been doing some test development on a Windows 10 VM for a long time now. I downloaded the VM image from Microsoft even. But I never bothered to activate it but it runs fine and gets updates. I can't change colors and backgrounds without using regedit, but for test purposes, it works just fine. Even gets updates. So if you can live with a little nag watermark, this is an option when this special free development VM expires. In fact when it does expire, just let it go into unactivated mode.
1. Re:Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine by gweihir · 2017-11-21 10:42 · Score: 1
  
  Indeed. Or Amazon has them as well. I have two in VMs that checked out as genuine without trouble. (I will not put the Win10 spyware into anything by a VM at this time....)
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
2. Re: Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine by gweihir · 2017-11-21 10:43 · Score: 1
  
  There are actual genuine ones. Like they are in a DB on MS side and they do not collide with other installations.
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
3. Re:Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine by antdude · 2017-11-21 12:33 · Score: 1
  
  Windows 7 as well if you installed your own. No need to enter a key. IIRC, Vista 8, and 10 asked for keys when installing your own.
  
  --
  Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
4. Re:Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine by Opportunist · 2017-11-21 20:45 · Score: 1
  
  Just to clarify, do I have to pay the 10 bucks or is MS desperate enough now to pay you to take them?
  
  --
  We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why Enterprise? by jtara · 2017-11-21 08:51 · Score: 2

Can't UWP development be done on any Windows 10 version with Visual Studio 2017?
I'm asking seriously, since I need to do this. But not build a UWP app from the ground up. I have an app written using the Rhodes hybrid app platform, currently running on iOS and Android. Rhodes also supports UWP, and at some point we need to support it. The goal is the run the app on Windows Surface devices (and on desktop/laptop).
I was assuming I would just install Visual Studio 2017 - (and maybe some additional tools/libraries?) on my already-licensed Windows-10 installation on VMWare over MacOS.
Am I missing something here? Is this just a bid by Microsoft to snare people into getting unneeded Enterprise licenses when any version of Windows 10 would do?
I guess the headline would be less compelling (if that is possible! ;) ) if it had read:
"Microsoft Offering 2-month demo of Windows 10 Enterprise for developers of UWP apps"
1. Re:Why Enterprise? by Parsiuk · 2017-11-21 20:51 · Score: 1
  
  I was playing with UWP on Windows 10 home with VS Community edition and it all worked just fine. VS is great dev environment and I absolutely love it, I keep messing with c# projects now. UWP is a cancer though.
not that big of an offering by jarkus4 · 2017-11-21 09:03 · Score: 4, Informative

Microsoft used to offer VMs of every Windows version that was in active support under the banner of IE compatibility testing. Only difference with this new offering is that they preload this image with whole dev environment instead of just a system.
Current location for images I have mentioned:
https://developer.microsoft.co...
Old one including WinXP (haven't tested if it still really works):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
Also.. by Tailhook · 2017-11-21 09:28 · Score: 2, Funny

it's a TRAP.

--
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Why would anybody waste time with this? by gweihir · 2017-11-21 10:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

I mean, a devel-environment that expires after two months? If you do things right, you are just in the middle of the first serious experiments when that happens.

--
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Universal Windows Platform apps by Anonymous Coward · 2017-11-21 11:57 · Score: 1

What nobody wants for Christmas!
*nix does not support sand boxing by aberglas · 2017-11-21 13:33 · Score: 1

I think the point "Universal" apps is that they are sand boxed. Following IOS many years later.
With traditional Windows or Linux apps, you install as root (or at least with full user privs) and so every application you install can take over your system (or at least your user data, which is what you care about).
I do not think there is any equivalent *nix technology. (chroot does not cut it, we are not trying to box users, but applicaitons.
SQL Server management studio sandbox will not by Joe_Dragon · 2017-11-21 17:38 · Score: 1

SQL Server management studio the sandbox will not let that happen.
news? by spongman · 2017-11-21 19:31 · Score: 1

how is this even news? these limited time dev VMs have been available for eons.
First thing to install by sproketboy · 2017-11-22 03:38 · Score: 1

something from JetBrains and do some real development.