Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Express, VS 2005 Beta 541
An anonymous reader writes "At the TechEd Europe keynote today, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1. With it, they also released a set of five 'Express Editions' of Visual Studio. These currently free applications offer a student and hobbyist-oriented version of Visual Studio, and are available in C#, C++, VB, Web Developer, and SQL flavors. Each download weighs in at right around 50MB and features tools, documentation, and starter kits. There's been multiple posts and more information on this announcement over at MSDN Blogs, too." Update: 06/29 13:57 GMT by S : A clarification from the Express FAQ: Although the Beta Express products are currently free to download: "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year."
Re:Difference between this and full version (Score:5, Informative)
Free during beta, pricing for release TBA (Score:5, Informative)
Q: "Are the Express Edition products free?"
A: "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire."
For great free, open source IDEs I recommend... (Score:4, Informative)
As an added bonus, both are cross-platform. ;-)
Express Projects not compatible with VS2003 Projec (Score:5, Informative)
Quote: "When you open a Visual Studio
So here starts the next layer of conversion hell!
Re:That's cool (Score:2, Informative)
Passport required .. (Score:5, Informative)
Not Sure about free (Score:5, Informative)
# Are the Express Edition products free?
We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire.
# When will the Express products, and the rest of the Visual Studio 2005 product line, be officially released?
The Visual Studio 2005 family of products will likely be released in the first half of 2005. Microsoft will continue to release Community Technology Previews (CTPs) and beta releases of the Visual Studio 2005 family of products until then.
Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Informative)
where you can use the java server faces (JSF)framework to nicely draw your work.
Important to note... (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting to see SQL Server Express 2005. As it's based on the Yukon engine, that it something I'll be downloading and playing with. I have no idea what edition of SQL Server this would replace, possibly Developer in the long run? It's mentioned that it's installed in a full VS 2005 install...
Re:That's cool (Score:4, Informative)
a. It's BETA, meaning not done and unsupported, not free
b. "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire."
c. as previously stated, there is no permission for distributing apps built with it
Re:Difference between this and full version (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Most important question: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Hobbyists?" (Score:3, Informative)
And Borland certainly have more interest in cross-platform development than M$.
Re:Sweet! (Score:0, Informative)
How are these different from... (Score:3, Informative)
... the "Standard" editions of VS.NET 2003? You can currently buy these cut-down versions of Visual Studio that only support C# [microsoft.com], VB.NET [microsoft.com], "J# [microsoft.com]" (whatever nightmare spawn of Java that is), or C++ [microsoft.com] for about $100 each. I imagine that when these "Express" products leave beta we'll see them priced at about the same level.
Re:Can you make a commercial product? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:feeding the addiction (Score:3, Informative)
There are actually two free
Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend... (Score:3, Informative)
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/downloa
And in the case of Eclipse, the debugger *is* bundled, just not the java runtime or compiler.
Try bloodshed.net - free compiler (Score:4, Informative)
Also try sharp-develop at www.icsharpcode.net/ , a free
Let's not forget SDK..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not really (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
All the more reason to check out
Say what you will about MS, they know how to cater to developers - to lure them over to the "Dark Side."
Re:For great free, open source IDEs I recommend... (Score:3, Informative)
I know we are all about open source here, but honestly.. this has very little to do with Microsoft launching Visual Studio Express. Maybe you should mention how you can code C# in Eclipse [improve-technologies.com]. And also mention sharpdevelop [icsharpcode.net] or monodevelop [monodevelop.com]. NetBeans, isn't really useful for
Honest Reply about VB (Score:2, Informative)
Summary of my experiences:
If 99% of tasks required are 1 day jobs, then yes, you can comlete those tasks in VB, in a cost effective and managemable way.
If the tasks are more technically involved, or require more advanced security, then you should forget it!
In terms of the GUI, yes you can indeed make it clean, but perhaps many people muddy good model/view seperation with the way they program in VB (I know I did!)
Sorry to cite Java, but it is possible to develop a Java [windowed] GUI in as much time as a VB GUI, and the number of excellent and mature packages to solve almost any development task, and the simple and powerful network transparency make it a developers dream.
When you apply the concerns of distributed applications or server side development, you can only increase the advantages of the J2EE platform.
Now that doesn't say that VB cannot be used for all problems, but I believe there is a cut off point where a tool like VB no longers becomes effective, and this probably is difficult to define.
I would also like to point out, that a tool is only as good as the person who wields it!
Re:Difference between this and full version (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's cool (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A new strategy from Redmond (Score:3, Informative)
Haven't been to a University with a Microsoft Campus agreement? They get almost all the Microsoft Software for free.
Need the Windows 98 disc, goto the Library and check it out for a day. Need Visual Studio 6, bring 2 CD-Rs to class, by the next class they will burn you a copy.
Heck the University I went to handed out Office 2000 (actual Microsoft discs with unique CD keys) during orientation.
Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Informative)
Have you used VB! Sure you can create an app with few textboxes and a couple of button quickly. But if it actually has do something it quickly becomes bloated and you our showing and hiding forms and knee deep into win32 api calls and ... gah! the horror!
Sorry VB flashbacks.
Re:about time (Score:3, Informative)
From the installation notes for the Express web development package
Considering the problems Microsoft are having with Windows security this just screams bad planning to me. Yes I know I can get this installed without having a problem due to having a hardware firewall but it's not going to be much help to Joe Home-User who doesn't know what he's doing 100% and blindly follows Microsoft's instructions.
For .NET development... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You're lucky (Score:3, Informative)
I'd love to use namespaces as they were intended, but because of the debugger problem I just use static members of a struct to emulate a namespace.
VC actually has pretty decent namespace support, they added (working) support for the 'non-.h' std-c-lib headers existing in the std namespace before anyone else.
C++ is a big language with lots of runtime requirements, I don't think any compiler or library vendor could be said to have the whole thing correct (and working with all support tools) according to the latest standard yet.
Re:Glad I got the Boss to Shell Out (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
http://members.microsoft.com/partner/competency/i
This offer is for companies only however...so my original reply is probably not valid as I doubt you could register one company twice in this program.
Re:That's cool (Score:1, Informative)
SSDD (Score:1, Informative)
This is not some nefarious plot to replace open source tools. MS already has that plan in place - they make good, easy to use tools, and provide good documentation for their tools. Sure, open source tools are great for experts and those willing to spend the time learning them - but MS has been infinetely smarter than the Open Source Movement in this one regard. They make their tools easy to learn and use - thus promoting quick uptake by students. Students that eventually become professionals, some of whom eventually become managers.
The open source movement is good at tactics, but sucks at long term strategy. This includes the advocates and users. Everytime somebody says, "RTFA", or says something akin to "People who don't understand (insert Open Source product), are stupid or lazy", they're just hurting OS. MS will glady hold that person's hand while taking their money, mindshare, and putting another little hurt into the long term efforts of OS. OS being dumb about this kind of stuff, is, unfortunately, also SSDD. OS has many products with great technical merits - but too many suffer from poor user friendliness or craptastic documentation. Most developers don't care about OS politics, or being leet because of mastery of some difficult tool - they just want to get the job done with the fewest headaches.
Open Source (at least some of it) is great. But they need to acknowledge that MS has some strengths which OS definitely needs work on. It's fine to bash MS, they definitely have major problem in some areas, but it smacks of hypocrisy when the OS moemvent doesn't acknowledge and fix it's own non-negligible faults.
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
I like it because ADO and VbScript (ASP) allow me to create business applications quickly and reliably. But I hate it because I spend a lot of time reimplementing things, or working around a broken include system.
Have you used VB? (Score:1, Informative)
You can use VB for complex, large scale, object-oriented projects.
You will find it used in this way in many large corporations, banks etc. to provide front and back-office services that tie into backend mainframe and network systems.
Ok. So your experience of application development may be restricted to lashing a few forms and buttons together - but don't let that color your world!
From the EULA (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
Xentax
Re:Let's not forget SDK..... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. I'm currently (as in I've alt-tabbed over from it to post this) using it to develop for PS2, using the SN Systems gcc-based toolchain and makefiles. It is trivial to use plug-in compilers, debuggers etc. with VS6 and VS.Net. May not be trivial to write them or interface them, but I didn't get the impression that that was what you meant...
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I just bought 5 MSDN Universal licenses for $35 (Score:3, Informative)
1) Look like a software company when they check you out
2) Ship a product and have it certified for some version of Windows (anyone know what this costs?)
3) Get an employee MCP certified.
So, it's not for everyone.
As for the high price of the "Universal" package, I think MS feel they need to price it in the same range as BEA and IBM's enterprise development packages (which list for $10 grand or so). However, if you are small shop and give them a ring, they arent cutting you any deals.
You can also get the a C# or C++ only version for about $100 each -- not much more than this "Express" version and probably sufficient for many folks.
Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Informative)
Taken care of in VS2005 - and it'll actually rename throughout an entire project. There are a lot of features along these lines that have been added in, which I've been grateful for these past couple months when I've been using it.
I used to be a VB "guru". Now I do Delphi. (Score:3, Informative)
I started programming way before Windows and used to do only basic. When Visual Basic came, it was awesome. I ended up doing even some pretty big projects with VB3. You didn't even notice that it was "only" made with basic as I knew how to write fast code. Learned all the ugly tricks and invented a few more while I was at it.
Problems started when Microsoft released VB4. The changes were so big (vbx->ocx, 16bit->32bit) that I realy couldn't compile my software any more. One of our employees went through the trouble with a smaller project but mine was pretty close to impossible. So I thought I'd rewrite and make a new and better version at the same time. I guess I chose VB5 or 6 at that point.
To speed up VB6, I decided to write DLLs with C. That's a lot more efficient when handling strings. What I noticed was that VB stores strings as 16 bit unicode. However, when the string is passed to a DLL, VB converts it to 8 bit Ansi. When an array is passed, the whole array is converted. It was awfully slow. Worse was that there was no way to change that. After one week of frustrations I decided to give Delphi a try.
Now I have done almost only Delphi for 4 years. Delphi is pretty much as easy as VB but it produces way faster code. The best part is that you can go as deep as you want when you want it. You can write your own controls, the object model is beautiful, and everything just works and makes perfect sense. The difference is really monumental.
When I look back, I can't imagine how stupid I was for using VB earlier.
It's very common (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
From my experience, this is the most commonly sited perk of VB. It's something that you've been able to do for darn near any language for a long time- GUI designers really aren't new, and VB doesn't even have the best one available.
The frequency that I see people cite the GUI designer as the major benefit to VB makes me think that most folks- especially the types of people on
That said, tools like VB and RealBasic (with which I've more experience than VB) are RADs for more than just a GUI designer. Using Glade for a C/GTK+ app won't make you as productive as a seasoned VB coder for simple app development, but it will shave off some time spent coding the GUI programatically.
But there are options, and some darn good ones on, for Linux:
Prima [eu.org]: a new GUI toolkit for perl- including a really nice RAD GUI builder- for Linux, OS/2 and Windows.
Squeak Smalltalk [squeak.org]: Runs on just about every platform. Uses a seperate GUI toolkit, but affords a huge amount of power and ease of development.
RealBasic [realsoftware.com]: A cross-platform VB clone for Mac OS Classic/X, Windows and Linux. *Really* nice. Costs money, but it's worth it.
RunTime Revolution [runrev.com]: Has a HyperTalk-like language and runs almost anywhere.
Re:Difference between this and full version (Score:1, Informative)
Also see Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
It can, and I do mean every case. The whole Smalltalk environment is a continuous series of executing processes, of which your 'application' is just one.
You guys need to give up looking down your noses at anyone who uses anything but (LISP/Smalltalk/insert other escoteric language here.)
I don't look down at other languages - in fact, I don't do Smalltalk development these days.
There is a reason all those languages have not been popular. They really don't address real world development issues.
Actually, Smalltalk was widely used at the end of the 80s, and still is used for real world development. For a time, it was touch-and-go whether Smalltalk or C++ would be the primary OO development language. Its a highly practical language for many situations, and is certainly not elitist. Unfortunately, the Smalltalk industry seemed to decide that high-pricing, awkward licencing, and forking the language was more important than widespread use, so it almost died out. Its better today, with good free implementations, like Squeak.
People use Microsoft development environments for a reason. It is because the complete package is there: an excellent dev environment, excellent help and online support, an installation system, top notch compilers and wide industry use.
Yes, I agree, these are good features of it, but I still feel strongly that people who don't have experience of something 'elitist' like Smalltalk at its best are not in a position to judge what is missing from something like Visual Studio. They think what they have is first-rate. Its good, but not that good.
Things are getting better, in terms of IDEs - IBMs VisualAge range was superb (after all, it was written in Smalltalk!), and Eclipse with its ability to execute and debug arbitrary code fragments is looking good, but they still aren't up to what many of us used years ago in terms of power and flexibility. At least, that's what I feel.
Coding Contest (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Compiling to native code? (Score:2, Informative)
-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn [msdn.com])
No evidence of that (Score:2, Informative)
They're all moving into the
I see no mass migration away from Microsoft, but I do see an extreme amount of interest from Java development shots to look at
These Express tools are obviously intended for the hobbyist market, to help build mindshare, in other words to compete against PHP and mySQL and such.
Anyway, you're simply making an argument by assertion without evidence.
Re:Can you make a commercial product? (Score:4, Informative)