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

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.)

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...

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.

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...

 

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.

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.