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Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students
Posted by
samzenpus
on Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:53 AM
from the first-hit's-free dept.
from the first-hit's-free dept.
beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students.
"The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites.
But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""
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Professional Tools (Score:5, Informative)
That kind of cracked me up. Remember kids, professional tools take up lots of storage space. If it's not big, it's not 'professional'.
Also - this is not open to any student in the countries listed. There is a list of about 42 schools in the US that are plugged into their student verification system. In Belgium it is 2 schools, China 3 schools, etc.
Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, once upon a time the GNU tools used to be installed more often from disks or tapes you bought from FSF than downloaded, because of what at the time were large file sizes. And the printed Emacs manual [amazon.com] is a 600-page behemoth. So, it's not as if the Free Software movement has always remained free from claims of heftiness or outright bloat.
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs 2.2: 36Mb zipped. (http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/)
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition: 2.2Gb required disk space (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/bb894726.aspx)
They got an entire operating system into 36Mb?
Probably because they left out the editor. That's the 2.2 Gb. ^.^
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Funny)
Yes. They were professional then.
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Informative)
* free
* open source
* mature
* interactive ide (code completion, debugging, refactoring)
* supports multiple languages
* Eclipse Rich Client Platform
* easily customizable, modifiable, pluggable,
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Informative)
When you use one IDE for all these languages, you only have to learn how to use one IDE. 'Nough said...
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same problem as any other plugin-based app: nobody cares about the app, all responsibility is delegated to the plugins. The hardest part is figuring out which plugins you want/need.
Me, I don't want to figure it out. I just want something that works. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck. Eclipse didn't enable me to do that in a reasonable time frame, so I ditched it. Maybe I need a step-by-step tutorial to learn how to install/use it... rather humbling given how I started programming back in the early 80's!
Everyone says Eclipse is awesome, and I'd love to be one of those people, but right now I see Eclipse as just another bloated unstable Java app like every other.
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't want to waste time fooling around with the various plugins and don't mind being a bit behind in versions, EasyEclipse [easyeclipse.org] is a great package set. Choose which "distribution" you want based on the tasks you'll do with it, and you get a well-tested set of plugins that do the functions you need.
I've moved on from it since I've gotten more used to which tools I actually need, but it's awesome for those just starting with Eclipse.
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Informative)
-Are exaggerating and expect vim like start times out of a huge IDE
-Hate eclipse... because its cool to hate (everyone know Java and everything produced with it sucks)
-Have really old hardware ( this was done on a 2 year old laptop )
-Haven't tried eclipse in a long time... or ever
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Insightful)
More like about 20-30 seconds. But still, so what?
I launch Eclipse at the start of my work day, at the same time that I'm launching my browser, my email client, and an instance of Explorer, and getting started on checking my email. By the time I'm done doing all that, Eclipse has long since finished loading and initializing. I never need to launch it again for the remainder of the day.
Fast startup time is a concern on something like a web browser or file editor, which you're likely going to launch repeatedly throughout the day, but not an IDE.
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, its command-line prompt in bash to compile from, syntax-highlighting editor (vim or kate) to code with, and the lamp stack to deploy on. Make, grep, some perl-fu, svn if you want to have a repository - it might not be "integrated", but it IS a great development environment, and VERY customizable.
The latest version of eclipse starts up fast enough if you have a couple of gigs of ram ... it just doesn't offer me what I want/need (yes, I know it can "sort of" handle c/c++, but I find it STILL gets in the way).
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Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Funny)
The other fun wording I found on the page is:
Download your products
I thought the products were the property of Microsoft? If I download this, can I assume full legal ownership of my copy?
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Almost Thar ... Stay on Target! (Score:5, Insightful)
But I don't quite agree with Gates here.
So this is all around good. I like it even though it's not open source, I think it will overall help Microsoft but may also clarify student's understandings of when to use what tools. I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license. I don't find anything wrong with that business model. One step further and it could be released under a pseudo MSPL license and another step in the distant future might also entail an even more open state for their development tools. Who knows? All I know is that although this isn't perfect, it's a move in the right direction.
What would really be juicy for me to hear is what Ballmer's take is on this move. I think Gates is generally moving in the right direction but I get this sense that Steve Ballmer is pure evil. Is he seething over this move which to him might just look like lost revenue? Is he even pretending to see this the same way Gates does or is he still in the blind rage "I will f*cking kill ____" mode? I think there are rough times ahead when Gates leaves the scene altogether and I think we will see Ballmer say some pretty stupid things directly contradicting Gates' "just another tool for their belt" view on this.
even xml (Score:5, Insightful)
in fact, one might go as far as to say that even xml is useful. Sometimes. If it's used correctly.
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Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:4, Interesting)
Having recently attended a top 5 CS department university, I can tell you that most students are developing in linux. Windows development (.NET to be specific) is only done by about 15% of students (my guess) and it is NEVER used in courses. Course projects that require UI's use Java. Otherwise, it is written in C, C++, Java, oCaml, Scheme, Perl, and PHP. I've taken upwards of 40 CS classes in the last 8 years and I have NEVER used Microsoft tools for coursework.
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Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:5, Insightful)
As for VS2005/SQLServer2005/IIS6. I've used all three of those in a corporate setting and while I agree that VS2005 is a nice IDE and SQL Server 2005 is a decent DBMS, I would hardly consider IIS6 good. Compared to Apache (and hell, even Tomcat), IIS6 is a bag of crap that is only used because it is required for ASP.NET (and other MS tech) websites.
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Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:4, Interesting)
However, a great deal of students go out on co-op and come back with skills in Visual Studio and Microsoft technologies. No one teaches these students how to use vim or emacs. These people were writing code in Eclipse or gedit before Visual Studio. You'd be hard pressed to convince them to switch away from Visual Studio after a 6 month co-op using it. It is far from perfect, but it is a great product and is used happily by many.
The real issues stem from the close minded cultural and social attributes of most professors I know. Nearly every CS class I sit through includes the instructor making at least one Microsoft bashing comment. There isn't really so much as a preference for FOSS tools as there is social pressure and general ignorance of the MSDNAA and Express editions.
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Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:4, Insightful)
If there is a direct correlation between software use in college and software used in businesses, then given Microsoft's dominance in developer tools today (and the past couple of decades) then it would be safe to assume that many colleges were Microsoft shops in the 1980s and 1990s, right? I started my undergraduate work in 1996, and there was no breath of Microsoft tools then. And, talking to older students and professors, there never had been use of Microsoft. Heck, my school didn't start teaching Java until 1998 or 1999. It was Pascal and C and C++ for decades previous.
I remember when I was in college I assumed (naively) that everyone in the real world was using what I was using: vim, g++, bash, etc. It wasn't until I got my first coop job that I realized that 90% of my coworkers had no idea what vi was. Point being, the tools used in university do not necessarily transfer to the real world for a plethora of reasons.
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Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully universities teach people how to program. It would be tragic if they learned just a particular tool like Visual Studio 2005, because what will they do when MicroSoft scraps and reinvents
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Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:4, Insightful)
If you wanted that, maybe CS was not what you should have picked... Did you even google what CS was before signing up?
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Re:Almost Thar ... Stay on Target! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Come Again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Help me out here, I have a Pentium III 877Mhz processor machine with about a half gig of DDR ram that I purchased in 2000. It still runs fine. For some reason when I install Visual Studio on the Win XP partition, it does not work so well. As in, it is barely usable for small applications and hangs indefinitely for large projects I have. Yet when I write a C++ application in the Linux partition using a number of various open source editors that utilize GCC, it works quite well. I don't mean just VI or Emacs, I mean several things including Gnome and KDE graphical editors (like Glade & KDevelop).
So tell me, what am I doing wrong? Several people have instructed me to buy a new computer but for some reason I do not think that I should have to buy a new computer every time a new version of Visual Studio comes out.
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Re:Come Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Come Again? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, any CPU released in the last few years + 2 gigs of memory (4 gigs better - splurge on the extra $40) will run VS fine.
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Re:Come Again? (Score:5, Funny)
Your recommended specs for a glorified text editor made me snort milk out of my nose. I hadn't done that since the 1st grade. Thanks for bringing back the memories.
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Re:Come Again? (Score:5, Interesting)
That pretty much sums up your post.
Try comparing Glade or KDevelop to Visual Studio, even the free-for-all Express Edition, on a technical level and then we can talk. I develop for both Windows and Linux, but I got to say, I prefer both Microsoft's compiler and IDE.
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Linux C++ Development better hands down (Score:5, Informative)
I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, for C#, Visual Studio is amazing, but for C++, Linux is better.
I like KDevelop.
1) Solutions management is better - KDevelop is much better at managing multiple build targets, working with complicated builds, and more.
2) Source control is better - that's really for any Unix system. MS source control blows compared to what you get out of subversion, just because vss uses that stupid check out model.
3) Collaboration is better. If you want a genuine team suite type of thing, its pretty hard to top SourceForge.
4) Standards are better. If you are -really- into C++, the GNU compiler is simply better because it follows the standards. If I had a dollar for every time I ported something from VC to GCC, found that GCC rejected the code, did some research, and found that GCC actually did the right thing, I'd be pretty rich. On the flip side, I don't think I've ever run into a situation where GCC did something non-standards compliant that VC++ actually did do.
5) Performance coding is better. The whole point of C++ is to be doing systems programming. That means you need to consider architectural things like integer sizes, interfacing with assembly language, and good timer calls. On all of these fronts, Linux is better. The sizeof(int) is right on Linux and wrong on Windows for 64 bit platforms.. and the calling convention and stack situation in 64 bit Linux is just better. It's almost as if Microsoft chose their convention deliberately to not be like what the rest of the world was doing. Interfacing with assembly is better on Linux. It used to be in Windows that you could do inline assembly, but -not any more- in 64 bit land, so it becomes a push between AT&T syntax versus MS syntax. I prefer AT&T assembler syntax just because it seems cleaner. Finally, gettimeofday() works really well on Linux, whereas Windows gives you a mishmash of calls... the basic SYSTEMTIME call stinks, then there is QueryPerformanceCounter, and whatever new one they through into Vista. Enough already. And I'll toss in that dealing with UTF8 is probably faster than doing UTF16 all the time, especially if you writing quick and dirty code to be hosted on western european and American servers.
6) Code is more accurate. Everyone deals with temporal data lately and that means time zone conversions. On Windows these do not work and cannot work because the OS does not consider historic time zone transitions, while Linux does.
7) There is no COM on Linux. A few years ago, I would have argued this to be a disadvantage for Linux, but, having seen the disaster that resulted from COM, I'd have to say that Linux sticking to a basic C style call for the vast majority of its services turned out to be a pretty good plan.
Really, I'd almost have to say that people who say Microsoft is better for C++ haven't really programmed in C++ enough to know what they are talking about. If C++ on Windows was that good, the world would not be beating down the doors to C#...
'Nuff said.
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Re:Linux C++ Development better hands down (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what's always worried me about getting into MS-specific technologies... arbitrarily limited lifespans.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As it happens... (Score:5, Informative)
-jcr
Re:As it happens... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also since Apple in it's infinite 'wisdumb(tm)' choice to kill the java bridge for Cocoa, I have no need to even attempt to use Xcode anymore *shrug*. Oh well.
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Re:As it happens... (Score:5, Insightful)
And the IDE is the best I've used TBH.
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Smart (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smart (Score:5, Insightful)
Languages and APIs are secondary. If you know how to write code, you can pick up either through its documentation in no time. It's not a University's job to teach you these. You can pretty much use any language on any platform to learn programming, since fundamentally, a Unix based C program is the same thing as a Windows based VB.net program. You have inputs, an interface, outputs and structures and algorithms. If you try to cram complicated APIs, you'll spend too much time on the actual API then on the parts of the program that are really what you're trying to teach. printf(); is as good as anyone needs to make an interface for educational purposes. You don't need a WinMain() and a WndProc() with a message loop to teach about sorting.
If you want to specifically learn how to code in a language with a specific API, go to a technical college. There you will learn how to do a GUI version of Hello World. You'll know squat about actual programming, but you'll know a language and an API and once someone has designed a program, you'll probably be able to implement it, as long as someone gives you complete algorithms.
This is the problem with students these days. They forgot they need to learn about programming before learning Languages and APIs. Like anything in life, the basics are more important, the specifics you can learn on your own once you have the basics mastered.
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Awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
A) A student is supposed to afford these $9000 suites that we're supposed to be familiar with before we get a job that licenses it?
B) I have to pay to develop for microsoft's OS..
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7614fe22-8a64-4dfb-aa0c-db53035f40a0&DisplayLang=en [microsoft.com]
The same is true of every SDK Microsoft every produced. You don't need Visual Studio to develop Windows apps.
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But wait, there's more... (Score:3, Informative)
SQL Server 2005 Express
Microsoft Expression Studio
And Visual Studio 2005 and 2008
A billion students? (Score:4, Insightful)
this feels wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
This smells a little like Netscape-gate. It would seem that giving away (very expensive) software to the demographic of "beginners" is using Microsoft's monopoly position to affect competition in another market, in this case software development.
While Open Source tools are available for free, this smacks of Microsoft competing by giving something of perceived monetary value for free too, thus offering something with the imprimatur of "valuable". This is similar to the Netscape debacle. The only difference is that a tool such as Eclipse's starting price already is zero. But, this move by Microsoft unbalances the playing field again with the deep pockets backing them as long as necessary. I'd guess their hope is they plant the seed early enough, and corner the student market and their future work to be always Microsoft products until other tools are no longer used.
When the rest of the competition disappears, Microsoft gets to charge as much as they want. If Microsoft wants to compete like this, I wish the government would do what they'd discussed doing before, and break Microsoft up into separate companies. This would force them to compete along product lines without the ability to destroy competition without fear of losing money in the process. They will lose money in the process, but they won't fear it. And, in the long run, this is a huge money and market grab for them.
Re:this feels wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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This is a "good" move on MS' part~ (Score:5, Funny)
But then I go home, and having thought of a great feature on the drive home, I FTP into my site, open with a text editor, (insert notepad/BBedit/eMacs/Vi here to taste), and write the code by hand. Even if that means copying an pasting, I... how shall I say this... ***still have to know what I'm doing***. Yeah, all you n00bs, you drag and drop those controls and use F4 to set the properties...Go 'head...
But the minute you have to do that with your ARMPIT, you are sunk. I took a written (the process of leaving graphite trails on paper) test for ASP.NET once... Unless you know what your are doing, you are screwed. Use whatever tools you want, whatever LAMP/.NET. But make sure you learn what you are doing, and not just doing.
Would be worried if it was true (Score:5, Insightful)
I heavily use MS tools (day job) and open source tools and Linux only tools. For argument sake lets say it costs me the same amount of dollars for all the applications/tools regardless of if it is MS or if it is open source -- I still prefer the open source tools. Obviously I don't prefer all the open source tools, there are plenty that I don't like. But those that I do like, I prefer them over their equivalent MS tools (or at least what MS would like to believe are the equivalents).
So this will likely just have the same IE/Netscape effect -- but who didn't see that coming.
"they want because it's more powerful" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Source Code? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/WindowsAcademic.mspx [microsoft.com], namely the kernel.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.mspx [microsoft.com]
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