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."
Sweet! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's cool (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good to see Microsoft trying to get on board with at least the spirit of Open Source.
Except that it's not Open Source, just free (as in price) software. Sure to raise some hackles around here.
A smart move (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft are attempting to lock students in, probably even before they hit tertiary education.
Most of the big distros come with good development tools these days. Still I bet Microsoft's tight integration is going to present a new challenge to the open source community.
Quotes in wrong place (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sweet! (Score:0, Insightful)
Nice Move (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Most important question: (Score:4, Insightful)
license (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's cool (Score:4, Insightful)
The more you get people to use "windows only" solutions the better microsoft feels.
They know it is all about the developers and want to lock them down as hard and as fast they can.
Hello how about Evolution for Windows to compete with Outlook?
A Move in the Right Direction (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that only the Express Betas are free - the final products will be a low-cost alternative, I suppose, for the hobbyist or beginning programmer.
What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system (like QBASIC was with DOS.) I think a lot of young programmers would get a good start if some bundled, easy-to-use development tools were waiting for them on install (Like C# Express right next to WordPad in the Accessories folder.)
It's sort of amusing that as Microsoft continually "expands" the concept of what qualifies as an OS (Web Browser, Media Player) they've removed another element that used to be considered primary and indispensable.
Missing the [share|free]ware scene? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nowadays, this niche is largely filled with F/OSS. Thus the MS platform is deprived of free help for home users, and misses out on home innovation. I cannot help to think MS is trying to win back some hobbyists/developers to their platform. This move reinforces that thought.
Re:MFC not included - again (Score:5, Insightful)
Use wxWidgets [wxwindows.org], or some other framework instead. For fun, why not try something like ClanLib... [clanlib.org]
MFC is godawful. Once you've tried a few of the other frameworks that allow you to write cross-platform GUI code for Windows, I doubt you'll disagree with me
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
I will say I have no interest in
Re:Most important question: (Score:3, Insightful)
A new strategy from Redmond (Score:5, Insightful)
MS are worried that the windows platform is hemorrhaging developers to linux/OS X platforms. And as MS know; more developers, means more software, means more users, means more money, means more developers, etc , etc...
These downloads are aimed at drawing younger, paticularly student developers, to coding in a windows enviornment. Previously, every programming course I ever heard of started with C and Java, because of the low cost of development tools. If MS release free Dev tools, I can see schools and Universities switching to teach VB and C#, so their students are ready for the "real world".A lot of people in my course complain about this, paticularly after internships. When people don't have to pay $600 for Visual Basic, I think its uptake might increase, just a little.
Looks like a long term strategy I think. The question is will it work?
I figure it will draw more programmers back to windows, paticularly those frustrated by the C++/EMACS/Shell method of programming, which is admittedly a tough nut to swallow for the budding hacker. Most these days are likely long term GUI users, much more at home in Visual Studio type enviornments. I know I was! That why I got anjuta [sourceforge.net] Anjuta be praised!!
Re:how about some free cigarettes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or was that a joke?
Re:How is Whidbey's C++ IntelliSense? (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free compilers!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
- Oisin
MS For A New Generation (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the
Re:A Move in the Right Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't we all; but you can't have it both ways. Microsoft were spanked for bundling IE, and we cheered. Don't you think they'd be spanked even harder for bundling VS?
- Oisin
Re:Honest Reply about VB (Score:1, Insightful)
So, you're saying that because you don't know how to make technically involved (and/or secure) projects work with VB then nobody else can?
The limitations mostly rest with the designer/programmer, not with the language.
Make money, good PR, invite hobbyists... (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance:
Take product X at $200
Remove 'enterprise', 'professional', and 'commercial' features. Sell as cheap hobbyist or student edition.
Remove 'enterprise' and 'professional' features. Sell as low end (shareware, small developer) edition.
Remove 'enterprise' features. Sell as high end developer edition.
Sell original software at 2-3x the original cost.
By taking the original product, splitting it further than it already was and spreading the price curve they reach more smaller buyers while milking the bigger buyers for more since they are willing to pay it.
It does give good PR (apparantly - it got on slashdot and many seem to think this is a 'good thing') It further gives cheaper tools for home hobbyists. Lastly, it removes some of the incentive for pirate software - if the average user can buy and download a fully supported working version for $50 and an hour of time they may be more likely to do so than searching, installing, troubleshooting, and wondering if the errors they keep getting are their fault or the fault of the pirated software.
But in the end it's simply an old method to extract maximum cash from a larger target audience, while encouraging current users to upgrade.
-Adam
One word. (Score:1, Insightful)
Ahn, ok, two words. So sue me.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Particularly for .NET development, it is missing many features that have been standard in Java IDEs such as JBuilder or Eclipse for some time. For example the ability to debug two apps at once (for client / server etc.), or to rename a class and all references to it throughout a file. Not to mention it's biggest flaw - DevStudio is intractably bound to developing apps that run with MS technology.
But even for Windows work, by far and away the most annoying 'feature' of DevStudio is the retarded context sensitive help. I've lost count of the number of times that I've hit F1 over something in a Win32 C++ project to be taken to a help page for Windows CE. I'm not sure what context it seems to be using, but it has nothing to do with what I'm doing.
Still, it's clear from these 'express' editions that MS is worried by the number of free alternative IDEs that are springing up - in particular Eclipse. After all, if students learn to programme using Eclipse, it means MS is completely frozen out the picture. After all Eclipse is primarily for developing Java apps (bad for .NET) and is cross-platform (bad for Windows). A few years down the line those students will be driving the market and a huge slice of potential MS revenue flies out the window.
Not directly...? (Score:3, Insightful)
For c++ apps, anyway. Or have I missed something?
Re:Passport required .. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would have loved to at least give it a try, but it requires you to log in using Microsoft Passport! Bad idea! I think many people are not willing to sign up for Passport - even for goodies like this...
Just make a dummy Hotmail [hotmail.com] account. It's virtually like downloading a program from other sites that require signing up. Remember, you're an 88-year old accountant from Zimbabwe, with name Aljsfdklsfe LKSJEFLKejf, and password asdf.
"Excelled" (past tense) being the operative... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A new strategy from Redmond (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Insightful)
Visual Basic is a quick-fix language, but left in the hand of an inexpert developer can lead to a buggy unsupportable mess (I have had clean up plenty of such messes). Something like Object Pascal would have been far better, with good type safety, yet high speed, and with true object orientation, not the crippled version of VB6.
Re:Sweet! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:RAD? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you know anything about
C# tends to be less verbose and more comfy for java developers. VB
I'd really like to see c/java coders get off their high horse about how "vb isn't a real language". It's just not true anymore.
**note anymore, yeah vb used to miss alot of things like true inheritance... that is all gone in
I just bought 5 MSDN Universal licenses for $350 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Difference between this and full version (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Insightful)
Is present in Visual C++, and has been for a while.
Re:RAD? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Quote. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Insightful)
The drag-and-drop pixel-positioning of Visual Studio form design? OK, so you can in principle do better, but most don't.
"Cross Platform Support" - Uh, yes, if you are talking about non-x86 support. Of course it doesn't run on non-Windows platforms. I don't think that makes much sense to create a Windows dev environment that RUNS ON OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS!!!
(no need to shout!) Why not? There are Windows CE development environments that run on Windows 2000.
The fact is, cross-platform and full-featured IDEs were available decades ago.
"Multi-processing" - Er, what? This makes no sense. If you mean support for multiprocessing in the compilers, or the ability to assign seperate compiles to different processors, then this is supported.
No: I mean a full featured multi-processing language and IDE combination that allows launching of several apps and processes at once, with the ability to follow individual processes, interrupt and resume them.
"The ability to break into an app" - Er, yeah. Um, thats in there. Its in the the debug menu: Attach to process.
And then compile and resume.
"re-compile bits and resume" - Er, yeah. Its been in since VS 5.0.
Its not there. If you have ever tried to deal with run-time bugs in VB6, you are regularly presented with a message that if you proceed with further edits, you will terminate the program. That really is not true compile and resume. Its poor a third-rate substitute. Remember, other languages and IDEs have been doing better than this for decades, so why not Visual Studio? It may be better in VS.Net?
"true object-orientation with inheritance" - Um, that would be a feature of the language, not the development environment. Clueless.
Not clueless, as in Smalltalk (which was the example I presented), the language and development system are one. The separation of language and IDE is arbitrary, and unecessary, as any Smalltalker or LISPer will tell you. Its so primitive.
"the ability to extend the IDE" - Er, yeah. You can do this. This is why so many companies sell VS addins to the IDE.
This is one of my real dislikes of Visual Studio. My impression (I could be wrong) was that it was designed partly as a way to set up a component and extension market for the IDE, not to allow developers to easily extend the IDE themselves. It took years before you could even write components in the main target language of Visual Studio itself: VB. In Smalltalk, you can adapt the debugger if you like, add new features to the process management, do all kinds of things, and then use those in your deployed application. There was a thriving market for home-grown extensions to Digitalk (and other) Smalltalk IDEs in the 80s and early 90s. These could be nothing more than the addition of a few useful menu items, but it was easy and trivial to do. Visual Studio (and many other popular IDEs) restrict freedom.
I mean really, why do people bother posting FUD? Is it for the karma, or are they really clueless?
You may disagree with what I say, and that is fine, but I don't see how it can be labelled either Fear, Uncertainty or Doubt. Its simply a critical comparison of IDEs, and as the Smalltalk market is very small, and I'm certainly not going to do Visual Studio sales any harm(!) I really don't see what the problem is.
Re:Can you make a commercial product? (Score:5, Insightful)
People who only wanted to develop in C++ would always be interested in Visual C++ Standard. "Why do I care about Visual Basic or Visual J#?" they would ask.
But then inevitably the question would arise whether the Visual C++ Standard license allowed you to write commercial software and for some reason the answer was never very clear. Most people thought the answer was no (see Google Groups), but MS's website never managed to include that most frequently asked question in its FAQ, despite year after year of people asking the question.
I notice now that the new C++ Express Edition doesn't include MFC or ATL, which are what most people doing commercial C++ for Windows would be using, but it does make a big deal about how you can write
It's a bit puzzling why MS doesn't just make the best possible development tools, including everything (MFC, ATL,
Reducing the cost of VS Pro + MSDN from thousands to zero would almost certainly increase the quantity and variety of commercial-quality apps for Windows, much of it free, making it harder for people to abandon the platform.
They've previously commented that they don't want to do that because it would destroy the 3rd party dev tools market for Windows, but given their history, that explanation seems laughable.
It can't be that they're trying to protect their Office apps from free competitors, because those are so huge that the resources needed by any challenger dwarf the cost of a few copies of VS Pro.
Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories.
Anybody know?
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Insightful)
What I meant was that the IDE should be open for casual developers to extend quickly and easily in the language they normal work in. It would have been great if, when VS was first introduced, you could easily add extensions to it in Visual Basic. Suppose you wanted to add an Edit menu item that linked to code to, for example, reformat your source. In the Smalltalk system, this is not only trivial, its expected practice, and a normal way to work. Visual Studio imposes a separation between the IDE extenders and component providers, and the casual developer. I think this is an arbitrary and unnecessary division. The thing is, its a fact of history that Gates saw and took an interest in IDEs that gave this kind of power to every developer, but when MS released Visual Studio it was (and still is to some extent) restrictive on what you can do and use. The big question is why?
Re:MFC not included - again (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, lots of us use it anyways...