Microsoft Giving Away Developer Software

That's a canny move and no mistake.

It is a very canny move. That's how Microsoft will maintain it's dominance. As much as I would like to develop on non Microsoft OSs, there is nothing that compares to the tools that Microsoft has., and the non Microsoft toll makers almost seem to be doing everything they can to aid and abet Microsoft in this area.

Just wondering if this can be considered "dumping" under some law. After all, VS + SQL Server + MS Server + all the other tools represents quite a big value. Especially if you consider the ridiculous price that a very bare Windows Vista Ultimate sells for.

Just like a drug dealer on the street. Boost the addiction of those already in your claws, get a few more on the road to being junkies.

(Plagiarized shamelessly from a thread a couple months ago.)

Quoting:Just wondering if this can be considered "dumping" under some law...

It doesn't matter and I am not sure if asking big brother to fight our battles would be of any value. I am not sure it would make a difference any how.

That was bound to happen sooner or later because Microsoft couldn't compete against zero cost and good technology.

With this move, they reduced their competing efforts some what for the time being. Companies will still pay full price and talented creative students would still prefer FOSS tools. They like to explore and tinker instead of being restricted and controlled. They wouldn't have the same opportunities with VS as with FOSS.

We will see how long this will last until they have to raise it again by offering it for free to developers too. This will weaken their business model.

As FOSS becomes an excellent technology with bigger share of the market, Microsoft will have to up the anti again.

Quoting:talented creative students would still prefer FOSS tools. They like to explore and tinker instead of being restricted and controlled. They wouldn't have the same opportunities with VS as with FOSS.

You've obviously never used Visual Studio.

Quoting:You've obviously never used Visual Studio.

I hate to tell you guessed wrong. I have VS 2005 on my laptop along with SQL Server express 2005, IIS 7, etc...

Although not my primary job, I do use it every day for company web applications development.

Quoting:I do use it every day for company web applications development.

So do I for eactly the same purpose, it's how we are so productive.

Well, I like how Gambas is coming along. If only somebody would make a nice IDE for KDE and GNOME (which btw... the main person behind Gambas is working towards... a way to make both QT and GTK apps.... with the ability to build packages for multiple distributions!).

EDIT: Take a look at this...

http://gambasdoc.org/help/doc/release?view

Note the screenshots and everything.

Quoting:Well, I like how Gambas is coming along.

Pretty interesting. I am sure it will have potential. Thanks for the link. I will check it out some times.

Quoting:it's how we are so productive.

To tell you the truth Tracyanne, I am more productive with FOSS. May be it just fits better with me.

May be Gambas will be the answer for your need of a tool like VS on FOSS. :)

Abe i've looked at GAMBAS it's IDE is no where near what I'm looking for, and I'm not a fan of BASIC, I programmed in it for way too many years, on Microsoft and non Microsoft (DECs) systems, to really like it, it's a bit like going back to COBOL for me.

I'm sure that at some point soon GAMBAS will be really useful though.

I agree. DIM just makes my skin crawl with unpleasant memories.

Quoting:I'm sure that at some point soon GAMBAS will be really useful though.

It could be the start of a good thing for many who feel more comfortable with such tools. If they do a good job at getting the GUI put in a nice way, I believe someone else could easily add support for other languages like PHP, Python, Java/Script. etc...

Too bad it is not far along enough for your needs. But, that is Open Source and we don't expect things be done over night.

About VS, don't misunderstand me, it is very powerful and many people like it because it suits them well. Microsoft knows that and they are trying to attract FOSS developers by making PHP, Ruby, Python, AJAX library, supported in VS IDE.

They even started giving it to students for free. They know that, when they get them hooked, it wouldn't be easy for them to leave it.

VS is cigarettes. Soylent Green is people.

Quoting:Soylent Green is people.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!!

Man, what a great and timeless movie. One of Heston's best as far as I am concerned.

Quoting:About VS, don't misunderstand me, it is very powerful and many people like it because it suits them well. Microsoft knows that and they are trying to attract FOSS developers by making PHP, Ruby, Python, AJAX library, supported in VS IDE.

They even started giving it to students for free. They know that, when they get them hooked, it wouldn't be easy for them to leave it.

Of course it won't be easy to leave, moving from a tool that provides the sort of functionality that allows a developer to work on the business problem instead of the tool is always hard, and not my preferred path.

There is a solution to that though. The FOSS community develop tools that provide the same sort of functionality. Encourage commercial tool developers to create tools that provide that sort of functionality for Linux. WingIDE is a huge step in the right direction, as is MonoDevelop (or will be when it's stable), and GAMBAS incidently.

Quoting:There is a solution to that though. The FOSS community develop tools that provide the same sort of functionality.

Or re-teach the programmer to use his tools. Most people using VS have never programmed without an IDE. When Anjuta broke my build I was forced to learn the tools and a whole world opened for me. An IDE constrains me. It forces me to work in a specific way and I can't go another way or the system breaks and you get hopelessly stuck. Especially VS make me feel as if it, and not me, was in control of my project. A lot of programmers may find that they don't need or want an IDE anymore.

Obviously this does not apply to you. You know how to work with an IDE and how to work without it. You prefer with. I prefer without. But a whole host of programmers have never experienced working without an IDE enough to be able to choose.

Quoting:They even started giving it to students for free. They know that, when they get them hooked, it wouldn't be easy for them to leave it.

And it's that many more students who are too "compromised" to be allowed to work on some FOSS projects.

What about Qt, or is it not analogous to VS? Unlike VS, it's cross-platform and clean, rather than another tool of MS lockin and lard.

Quoting: It has. I might have the tool I'm looking for

And the winner is.......??

> What about Qt, or is it not analogous to VS?

As I understand it, qt is really just a tookit, TC, not a full IDE. It's primarily a set of libraries which you can use to develop for both Linux and Windows. Slackware calls qt "a multi-platform C++ graphical user interface toolkit".

Quoting:That's a terrible indictment of FOSS

You've been collecting and presenting the evidence, my dear. Very adamantly, I might add.

My problem isn't with Visual Studio in itself. My problem is that VS gives you a hard row to hoe if you deviate from a MS-only toolchain, from the platform (well duh) to the language to the build system to the compiler to the linker and back to the platform again.

Throw in the proprietary documentation formats, and the undocumented API's, and I'm not interested.

That said, if you stay within the boundaries MS places on you, you can do some slick stuff. Just not nearly as slick as MS's own devs.

Quoting:You've been collecting and presenting the evidence, my dear. Very adamantly, I might add.

It wasn't I who said.

Quoting:FOSS will never catch up to your expectations. Like it or not, your standards are set by Microsoft, while most of us are quite happy with what FOSS already offers.

On the other hand if you are happy for FOSS to be second rate, I guess it's good enough. I personally think it's capable of much greater things, and yes my expectations are high. I've seen what it capable of when even a little money is spent, it's just a pitty there's no on going investment.

Quoting:Throw in the proprietary documentation formats, and the undocumented API's, and I'm not interested.

That said, if you stay within the boundaries MS places on you, you can do some slick stuff. Just not nearly as slick as MS's own devs.

You completely miss the point.

Quoting:What about Qt, or is it not analogous to VS?

Not at all. Qt is a library. VS is an IDE. To make a rather crude analogy to the world wide web: Qt is your browser (like FireFox). Visual Studio is your HTML editor.

Quoting:It has. I might have the tool I'm looking for

WingIDE?

Quoting:In addition, it might get one or more FOSS tool developers to take a look at what's available, what's being asked for, and scratch that itch.

You mentioned that you're willing to pay so perhaps setting bounties is the way to go. I'm sure other people would want to chip in as well for certain functions. What you need then is an application that can be improved in order to become your perfect IDE.

If it's C/C++ you want then Anjuta might be a good base. My main complaint about Anjuta is how it handles the GNU autotools for a build system. It's a bit VS-like. It works well as long as you don't go off the path set out for you by the IDE. Try to do something the non-Anjuta way and you're looking at a broken build system that you need to fix manually. And that's not easy.

Quoting:I've seen what it capable of when even a little money is spent, it's just a pitty there's no on going investment.

I have a PayPal account.

@tracyanne:

Quoting:You completely miss the point.

Not really. I'm just throwing in my $0.02, that may spur some thought in someone else, to clarify what they might be trying to say.

(And please don't ask about my time as a VS-using dev. It's a time I'd rather forget, overall...)

@Sander

Quoting: If you like big, integrated IDEs with all the bells and whistles then you'll love Visual Studio + tools. It beats Eclipse hands down.

In my experience Eclipse beats VS in terms of code browsing and keyboard shortcuts. I have not used the two for GUIs or web development so cannot say about those but for coding purpose I find eclipse to be much better.

Quoting: WingIDE?

That was my guess, too. C'mon, tracyanne, spill the beans, the suspense is killing me!!!

(The reason being, I know several people who use and like VS just as much as you, and if there is a Linux-based IDE that impresses you, I figure it might impress them.)

rijelkentaurus: You should rememeber that WingIDE is a Python IDE, not a general purpose or C/C++ IDE like Visual Studio is. That said, Python + Glade3 is a great way of quickly building Linux GUI applications.

GUIs are for WIMPS. (Windows Icons Menus Panels Skels)

Gooey Wimpy Users - don't get stuck on me.

@Sander, Wing IDE looks pretty good, I haven't had a chance to do anything much with the trial version yet, but it seems to all or most of the functionality that I'm looking for, which means I can concentrate on what the code does rather than where everything is and how to get at it. It also has a built in graphical debugger, code completion, and intellisense. I better run out and get a book on Python programming.

@tracyanne: Python has excellent online documentation: http://docs.python.org/

Start with the tutorial (you should fly through it if you have previous programming experience) http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html and then dig into the standard library http://docs.python.org/lib/lib.html

It's pretty good stuff (though not as good as PHP's online manual. That's just one of the best pieces of documentation I've ever used. The large amount of user comments in the PHP manual are worth their weight in gold).

Time to learn PHP, Python, Java, MySQL, Ajax. ... I need to spend less time worrying about operating systems and more time worrying about stuff that'll keep me employed (especially with the journalism biz sinking into oblivion).

Quoting:PHP, Python, Java

Pick one. Don't try to learn all three. That's a waste of time. To sum them up really quickly:

PHP: Very good for web applications. Moderately useful for CLI tools/applications. Powerful but a bit messy. Python: Great all-round language. Good for web, CLI and GUI apps. Not very widely used in businesses yet but growing really fast. Java: A must-have for big enterprise. Pretty well all round but GUI intergration sucks. I get the feeling many Java people are learning Python these days (for new projects).

Python is more popular than Ruby, but I would venture to say that it will remain a niche, albeit an important one.

Solid RDBMS skills are a must no matter what. You absolutely cannot get enough of that under your belt no matter what technologies you develop with.

Quoting:Solid RDBMS skills are a must no matter what.

I couldn't agree more. That has always carried the day for me, and the amount of really poorly designed databases I've seen being used in critical business applications astounds me. Sometime, it seems to me, that any person who can cobble together some code thinks that great database design is a few poorly normalised tables thrown together in a database.

You can go overboard with n'th levels of normalization (a trait I have to keep myself in check on), but you are right that many people don't have a clue...everything 'this' in one huge table, everything 'that' in another. Massive duplication, huge amounts of superfluous, unvalidated text identifiers and not the slightest idea what a lookup table is. All unindexed. Whoopie!!! Fun stuff. At least we're getting paid to sort it out (hopefully).

This is a brilliant marketing move that promotes the value of Microsoft's tool chain, maintains a high level of talent availability in the marketplace for employers, and promotes critical computer science education. Microsoft's management and marketing staff are to be commended for this contribution.

Of course in real world it will only be of minor benefit to the IT departments of schools and universities. They can now host the packages internally or hand them out on DVD and maybe reduce the BitTorrent load on their networks.

Maybe there is something new with the XNA tie-in but I can't imagine that the Xbox will be opened up unrestricted for student code since that would be way too much malware fun. But of course this is Microsoft so I can't assume that they wouldn't either.

From a marketing perspective, it's no different than a tobacco company trying to get kids hooked on its products.