Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students 555
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.""
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..
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Almost Thar ... Stay on Target! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Professional Tools (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Smart (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's Futile Freebies; Too Little, Too Late (Score:1, Interesting)
About a decade too late, Microsoft is finally seeing the light.
A recent article (registration required) in the New York Times discusses how the Redmond giant is now "giving students free access to its most sophisticated tools for writing software and making media-rich Web sites."
Ha! I would definitely disagree on the "sophisticated" adjective. Are these noble motives? Hardly. But for non-technical types, this could easily be painted as a seeming variety of evangelical philanthropy. Truth-seekers might ask: does Microsoft really care about all those poor, starving students of the Universe? And if so, why does it care now instead of before; haven't computers been around quite awhile? If (past) actions speak louder than words, the obvious answer would be "Microsoft doesn't care." This futile freebie is far too little, far too late. The computing world got along just fine before there was a Microsoft, and it will continue to get along well whether or not Microsoft does. It could probably be easily proven that the legally-laden profit-seeking motives of the MSFT corporation have actually hindered progress, especially progress of technically-inclined students.
One of the main problems with capitalism is that it is based on the assumption that every single action by every person everywhere has a monetary-based profit motive. If this were true, libraries would not exist. Indeed, in a purely profit-motivated society, freedom itself would not exist, as time itself would be handcuffed to the dollar sign; choice, the ability to research between or among alternatives, and a non time-constrained intuition are keys for progress.
A related, but somewhat tangent aside: I cannot quantify the irritation I have with my Business 2.0 magazine subscription being replaced by the megacorporate-centric Fortune magazine. The latest two editions have been severely disappointing. Business 2.0 was about innovation, ideas, progression, change for the better. Fortune had "The $100 Billion Woman" Melinda Gates on the cover for January 2008 and some corporate greed investment propaganda on the cover for February of 2008. Evil real estate people. While I can respect "rich, powerful" women, I don't really aspire to go about having dollar signs attached to my "net worth".
I sometimes wonder what direction my academic career might have taken if I'd discovered Free Open-Source Software sooner. My advocation of FOSS stands today stronger than before; it is indeed a particularly useful tool for students, teachers, professors, small-medium business owners and other efficient [zentu.net] people of the world.
Microsoft Business Model (Score:1, Interesting)
February 27th Microsoft will be unveiling their new open source movement with things such as Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. I won't go into details as you can already find them on google. All this coupled with the new Yahoo merger and it becomes apparent that the over-aggressive left hand is no longer speaking to the old school executive right hand. It's all rather disorienting to the consumer, which may help them in the end.
However, the OSS community should be at ease right now. While the hype of this is allowing students (who were already Microsoft oriented in the first place) to download their software, there is confusion and misdirection internally at Microsoft. For the product marketing teams,developers, and project leaders this is a bittersweet victory. Not only that, but the dynamics of the OSS development process are really about to shine. Tested and proven versus hasty deadline shipments.
They are up against a market that is not drawn to pretty themes and hype out of ignorance. This market inherently demands results.
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.
Re:Come Again? (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Then you're a crap coder (Score:3, Interesting)
If your ability to code depends on what IDE you're using then I think its fair to say you're probably no good at it. Perhaps you should consider doing an MBA instead.
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.
Re:Come Again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Your recommendation is appalling. His computer works fine. He needs a text editor and a compiler. Why should he upgrade his computer ? In the real world, we professionals like to spend our disposable income on something else than bigger and better text editing machines, seeing how most computers from the late 90s can still edit text like the best of the best.
Re:Professional Tools (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Professional Tools (Score:2, Interesting)
Whereas Eclipse is a nice piece of software, I have found that
That being said,
Re:Professional Tools (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
Granted, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the orders of magnitude difference between the two is amazing.
Re:Come Again? (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to work on a missile simulation toolkit for the Army that targeted Windows and Linux and a few other minor platforms. It seemed like we always had to tweak it for different changes in GCC, not just major revisions from 3 to 4 but even point changes in 3 and 4. It was perfectly valid c++ code, compiled fine in Intel's compiler and MSVC++ under Windows (multiple releases), but GCC for some reason liked to whine.
My second data point is personal experience on my master's thesis work. It was a a computationally intense code. I played around with code speed optimization under both GCC 4 and MSVC++ (Express), and found my code ran substantially faster on the same computer under MSVC++. It sounds counterintuitive if you believe everything about Windows and Linux, but I did my research and I do believe I was flipping the right optimization switches under GCC. Even unoptimized, MSVC under Windows was faster.
I try my best to keep my code clean so it will compile anywhere (just today I ran some code under Linux that was born under Windows 4 months ago and never touched Linux, only required three edits, capitalization of include files...), so I'm not tied to a compiler, I just use what feels best based off of comparisons. What works well for me might very well not work for someone else. I do very specific kinds of code - generally very computationally intense though not very memory intense, no GUI's, etc.-
Just an extra tool (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Professional Tools (Score:3, Interesting)
Eclipse is wonderful but it could be SO much better! This sort of crap just turns developers off it, and rightly so. We can't afford to sit on our hands and say how wonderful a product is when it has so many flaws unless we wish to perpetuate the "open source = buggy" meme.
Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Professional Tools (Score:3, Interesting)
I've used both on my slow laptop and eclipse takes far longer to do just about anything. I eventually ended up only using it to do testing* and did all my editing using something simple and fast. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't have finished the project without eclipse, but fast it wasn't.
*A lot of the handset makers release modules for eclipse that include testing and emulation.
Re:Just another sign of the Microsoft apocalypse (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree wholeheartedly. I didn't mean to imply that every company in the real world uses Microsoft products, but the original poster was claiming that Microsoft was doing down because they were not reaching university students. I argue that there is very little correlation between the tools one uses in college and the tools companies in the real world use.
Nor was I proposing that universities should teach Microsoft technologies. The tools used should depend on what the education is intended for. There is a big difference between computer science and software development, yet most universities have just one curriculum for both tracks. Excluding Microsoft products seems a bit silly if you are wanting to become a professional software developer.
Re:Professional Tools (Score:3, Interesting)
They are trying to lock the next generation in to using their tools.
Wow they are giving away a server? But wait, Linux is already given away and its far more capable.
Kdevelop and Eclipse spring to mind for IDEs.
Re:Come Again? (Score:2, Interesting)
How can one expect the developer to have realistic views on how their program runs on the users machines if they have top-of-the-line computers while probably a majority of the users have a few years old box?