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

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.

Comments

First!

[Archangel Michael]

First Hit is free!

Re: First!

[Zero__Kelvin]

Your dad I hope. It would be pretty inappropriate to talk about your Mother that way.

Re:First!

[Archangel Michael]

Okay, so, nobody gets my joke about giving away drugs. I guess I'm the old greybeard I used to mock. Sigh.

Re:First!

[ilsaloving]

*raises hand* I did!

Unfortunately it looks like a clan of trolls got to you first.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why?

[SQLGuru]

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.

Re:Why?

[Altrag]

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.)

Re: Why?

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Excited?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Jesus Christ!

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Jesus Christ!

[gweihir]

Hahahah, nice. "Free as in Herpes" is something I have to remember.

Re:Jesus Christ!

[Opportunist]

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?

call it what it is..

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a TRIAL

Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine

[caseih]

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.

Why Enterprise?

[jtara]

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"

not that big of an offering

[jarkus4]

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..

[Tailhook]

it's a TRAP.

Why would anybody waste time with this?

[gweihir]

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.