I think that non-windows devs don't realize how much Windows devs LOVE Visual Studio. They will spend however much money it costs to use it. Also, VS is like $500-600? Devs pay that for IntelliJ all day long, so why not VS?
Honestly, for a tool you would use all day long at work, $500 is cheap. If you NEED Visual Studio for C++, then it's worth the money.
Sure, on Linux and OS X you get free dev tools like XCode and GCC, but MSFT spends a lot of money building these tools, so if they decide they no longer want to subsidize them by offering them free, it's their business.
They want devs making Metro apps, not old Win32 C++ apps. If they don't get Metro apps to be built in a big way, Windows 8 tablet edition for human beings 2012 is never going to take off.
Maybe this is more of an internal fight between DevDiv and Windows. DevDiv's team had been stripped, their projects like WPF and Silverlight end-of-lifed, while the Windows team has made a fourth version of XAML.
The only for DevDiv to regain its honour is by reminding Windows Divisino that the oxygen Windows lives on is in DevDiv creating new developers. Given that VS11 Express is only a toy, and requires a presumed $99 annual subscription to deploy, it is going to be difficult for any students to justify.
This civil war is going to maim the Windows ecosystem at a time when it is especially weak.
developers only like visual studio because either they haven't had much experience with anything else, they use languages that require massive amounts of IDE to be practical or they paid for it which results in 'money bias'.
Its rarely because they knowingly like it.
That's the opinion I've managed to deduce after working with over 200 heavy vs users over 10 years.
I've only used VS for 180ish days, but it is good enough that my confidence in LightTable increased when I found out Chris Granger was previously involved with VS.
The biggest problem is that they apparently will no longer provide free compilers. That will make continuous integration windows backends even harder to deal with than they currently are, and basically unavailable to most open source projects.
It sounds to me as though your logic double-flipped at the end of your message... I'm going to try to break it down into propositions:
Proposition A: Developers who write windows apps love
Visual Studio.
Proposition B: Developers who NEED Visual Studio can
afford a $500 piece of software.
Proposition C: Other OSes still provide free tools
Proposition D: MSFT spends money on developing this, so
they can choose to charge money for
supplying this
Proposition E: MSFT wants people to make metro apps in a
big way, and not to work on win32 stuff
Conclusion: Charging money for Visual Studio is sensible
Propositions A, B, and D form a coherent argument in support of your conclusion, and Proposition C may be nice to include, but isn't helping here. Proposition E appears to run entirely counter to your point.
edit: as my responder points out, I'm incorrect in this assessment -- proposition E fits into the argument just fine. This is the folly of reading comments before having read the article!
Apple spends money developing Xcode yet when they started charging $5 for it there was a huge outcry. I feel like HN often upvotes the most contrarian comment by default (assuming it's well argued).
As a rule of thumb, Windows devs are mentally locked into Visual Studio and GUIs. They do not want to touch the command line. Open source scares them because it's libre & free. It's like some freaky movie where the Alien Software got downloaded into human brains and started issuing commands.
It's like some of these guys don't do computer programming any more. They program Visual Studio using C#. Of course, Visual Studio ain't bad, but the Visual Studio users are pretty rabid.
They would fork over thousands for their addiction.
Indeed - why not make a $2500 MSDN subscription compulsory to develop for the Windows desktop. After all if you are writing apps you can afford it.
If they decide that they don't want any apps on Windows other than Office it's their business. But it's a bit of a change from developers-developers-developers!
Good. Microsoft can officially go to hell with respect to desktop development after the day I've had today dredging through a debugging job from hell.
75% of my time writing software is:
* Watching VS crash miserably. It's just seriously unreliable.
* Digging through MSDN trying to find out cryptic errors.
* Desperately trying to debug issues with various black boxes (today was 4 hours on a w3wp crash due to a CLR.dll bug related to stack usage resulting in an interesting session with EDITBIN).
* Dredging through hotfix lists trying to find out which one solved a problem.
* Sitting on the phone for HOURS to MS support who barely speak a work of English these days and don't give a shit - they just want you to fuck off so they can close the case. This is usually because two products won't talk to each other (IE and ClickOnce for example).
* WAITING LITERALLY FUCKING HOURS for things to compile and rebuild.
* Endless fucking updates that take several minutes to apply, sometimes an hour plus. I WANT TO USE MY FUCKING COMPUTER.
Not much:
* solving problems of my own.
Sorry for the rant but that's why it's really dead.
Good riddance.
It's all a "me too" as google and apple have app stores.
I think the problem is with the software you are developing rather then the IDE. If it is taking you hours to compile, there is something very wrong. I recently worked on a couple of 1 mill+ loc projects made up of more than 100 projects in a solution, which compiled in a few minutes.
For what it's worth, I found VS2010 to be so slow and prone to crashing that I reverted to 2008. Since installing the VS2011 beta, though, I haven't looked back. It's been great.
I work on C++ desktop apps, though, and they aren't huge. Your mileage may vary.
It seems Microsoft only has one reliable tactical move: leverage the installed base of Windows users. They always fall back on this strategy whenever they want to prop up some other product.
For developers, they often provided carrots to encourage them in a certain direction. This tended to work sort of well, as there are always large numbers of new CS students expecting the Microsoft-recommended stack to provide a reliable career ticket. Maybe after they saw what Microsoft just did to Silverlight developers and they're not so eager to follow that path.
I never thought that they'd go so far as to actually take the stick to native Win32 developers. How can they not realize how much of their app ecosystem is still built on native code and how much easier it is to get started with that type of development on other platforms?
(In every one of these forums one or two people pop up to say how great this will be for developers and you can still use the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition to write native code or managed code to write C++. This is not correct, that product is crippleware and the managed code stuff is not anything like native C++.)
Directly contrary to the thesis of the article: Microsoft is absurdly generous with software licenses if you're going to build on their stack. Even without getting a deal from the inside, you can get on their e.g. BizSpark program, which gets you essentially every software product made by Microsoft for free for three years.
This seems like a huge over reaction, and bordering on misinformation.
First of all, for the longest time there were no free versions of Visual Studio for producing any kind of application.
Second, even the recent "Express" versions have always been severely crippled. Where were the "No-cost 64-bit development is Dead on Windows 7" when the previous Express versions were released?
The Express versions are more like promotional tools than real versions of VS. For any serious development you'll probably need to buy a VS license anyway.
Yes, Express has always seemed like something of an amateur development tool useful mainly to students who will graduate before writing 3000 lines of code.
But the command line compilers in the SDK and DDK are a different story.
Peter didn't say anything inaccurate as far as I can tell (I read the original MSDN post). He also laid out the history of VS Express very well.
You can do serious development with Express, its actually a quite nice and small IDE, great for laptops with capacity issues. If you are doing C# programming on .NET, then really what else do you really need?
I started off as a hobbyist developer who thought you had to use Visual Studio to develop for Windows. So I pirated a copy because I couldn't afford the real thing. As soon as I figured out that there were cheaper or open source alternatives, I uninstalled and went that route. The Express versions made me look at Windows development again.
Even though I can afford the Professional version now, I really don't like to see the way that they are going. I think its boneheaded and might close them off to a new generation of programmers. Open Source and IOS development are already seen as the "cool thing". I don't see how this move gets Microsoft back into the good graces of a younger generation of programmers.
I see this as just another side-effect of letting a marketing guy (Balmer) take the helm instead of a developer (Gates). As soon as visual studio became segmented into different versions it no longer represented a product designed to increase developer adoption of Windows. Instead, it became a potential profit center. A short-term financial gain at the long-term expense of Windows applications and market share.
Companies that are willing to take long term risks are not valued in a world of high frequency trading. Balmer is hoping that by force feeding Windows 8 Metro apps down developer throats he will convince Wall Street that Microsoft isn't dead yet.
"It's very likely that most productivity applications will stick with the desktop for some years to come. The same is true of utility programs, AAA-gaming titles, and a large swath of current Windows software..."
My bet is most of these developers currently pay for Visual Studio professional versions anyway. So, not much different for them. Seems like the new restrictions are just for hobby development - they'll be forced to make Metro-style apps, which is what they (MS) wants.
That's not always the case. I have grown overwhelmingly comfortable writing all my utilities and demos in Visual Studio, but I no longer work for a Microsoft shop, which is where I've always gotten my VS licenses. On any new computer I purchase for myself or at a non MS-centric job, I rely on Visual Studio Express, and this news really sucks for me.
If my VS 2010 Express Edition works, why should I care?
Not having the 2011 IDE isn't going to affect my productivity anywhere near the degree that a lack of coding expertise does...it's not like I need to rush out and upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. If I have an excuse to skip an upgrade cycle next year, that's fine with me.
Over the long term, I expect Microsoft to continue to provide appropriate tools for the amazing price of free as in beer...again, it's just hard for me to see what someone is complaining about when 2010 Express Edition will continue to be available.
Finally, Reading through the comments, there's very little, "I use VS Express and now I'm screwed." I've played around with Windows Phone SDK, and it's easier to produce something that looks good than with WPF or Forms. Though I hate to say it, switching to all Metro for anything desktop related will probably make me more productive not less.
(edit) If I want to write a command line utility, I'll continue to use powershell.
I used be one of those suckers who would fork over $hundreds to Microsoft every few years to keep up with the latest-greatest VC++ and SDKs. Always annoyed me how Microsoft would cripple its affordable tools in ways that I feel actually hurt Windows in the long run. It definitely made me shelve my own Windows projects and get into web development instead, and there's no regrets there.
I don't understand why they would do this. Seems like people will just shrug and migrate towards the free tools that will help them solve a variety of problems in more interesting ways (e.g. gcc, python, ruby, JS, etc.). Then they'll start migrating towards platforms that make it easy to create those solutions (Linux, OSX).
I've found myself a nice sweet spot - Windows Driver Kit (WDK) - it ships with Compiler (MSC 15.0) that can target MSVCRT.DLL
It's unusual to use something like the WDK for Desktop Apps, but it works.
The compiler is a bit outdated, and there is need for some trickery to get stl7 (internal naming) to work, but if something is missing you can install latest WSDK with it and reuse missing libs/headers from there (platform sdk)
At work I do use VS2010 with .sln/.vcxproj, but for my projects I just stay away from this - either makefiles, shell scripts, or some other tool, but not .sln/.vcxproj
Then again, I don't do much UI stuff, and If I do - I do it in code.
Debugging is there (but a bit harder, then again much more powerful) with WinDBG. There is also OllyDBG.
So WDK + SDK (missing pieces) and I'm set. And since I avoid heavy C++ projects, prefer to stick to C it's not problem for me. Occasionally I have to fix simple problems, like variable not declared at the top of the block, which never "C" compilers are okay, but MSC 15.0 is not (the one from WDK 7.1)
Reminds me of OS/2: a great OS with expensive development tools, and some of us remember how it ended... except that Windows 8 is not so great in comparison with contemporaries.
I remember reading a Jerry Porunelle column where he described the difference between talking to IBM and Microsoft at COMDEX that year (1991?). IBM was charging something like $400 for its driver development kit at the time. He said "if I go over to the Microsoft booth and tell them I want to write device drivers for Windows, they'll stuff diskettes in my bag".
But I'm sure IBM was thinking "if you're making hardware devices why couldn't you afford $400 for a OS/2 driver developer license?" Like Microsoft's dim early understanding of open source software, completely missing the point.
For those just reading the headline and not the article, it is important to note that Visual Studio 2010 Express will continue to be available for free. (But it won't take advantage of changes to the compiler or the environment.)
Only a fool would base their development environment on the hope that an outdated compiler version will still be downloadable from Microsoft's website into the future.
That thing is crippleware anyway, it can't even produce native 64-bit executables. Raise your hand if you're still on a 32-bit operating system.
I agree with Ars that the VisualStudio changes are bad, but is there any confirmation that the SDK change isn't temporary/won't have an official solution by the time of shipping? Microsoft has distributed the C++ compiler for years; it'd be very odd for them to do an about-face now. This reminds me off the uproar when Xcode 4 was suddenly a $5 purchase...except that it wasn't for users on the newer OS, when it actually shipped.
I used to be devoted VS2010 user, but when C++11 came out, I realized that Microsoft had no intention of incorporating all of the changes into its products in the near future. Accordingly, I moved to MinGW with gcc 4.7 and use Code::Blocks as my IDE. Although I'm giving up a considerable amount of usability, the trade off was well worth it.
Why are restrictions on WinRT boneheaded? Windows on the desktop and Android on mobile shows us how spyware and viruses are a very big problem without those restrictions, compared to, say iOS. Not to mention battery life and security.
I hope nobody minds too very much if I inject just a little bit of reality here: we are just about the only profession/trade/occupation on the planet that seems to believe that our tools should be free (as in beer). Carpenters, mechanics, hairdressers, even window-washers all have to pay for their tools (and the associated supplies and tool maintenance), and most of them don't get anything like the ROI that a door-to-door ASP.NET site peddler would get pounding the pavement in downtown Lesser Podunk after buying the ultimate all-in version of VS. Maybe it's time we dropped the entitlement attitude.
>>we are just about the only profession/trade/occupation on the planet that seems to believe that our tools should be free (as in beer).
That is because software development tools like all other software is just data, once written and debugged. Data can be copied at zero cost, which can not be said about physical tools, at least for now.
Visual Studio 2010 will continue to work just fine. As will 2008 or even 2005. Anyone with a business license, even a $50 sole proprietorship, can get every piece of software Microsoft makes for zero dollars via free MSDN subscription [1]. This includes licenses for Office, XP/Vista/Win7 home/pro/ultimate, Visual Studio Ultimate, SQL Server, and so on and so forth. The licenses are free forever and ever.
[+] [-] programminggeek|14 years ago|reply
Honestly, for a tool you would use all day long at work, $500 is cheap. If you NEED Visual Studio for C++, then it's worth the money.
Sure, on Linux and OS X you get free dev tools like XCode and GCC, but MSFT spends a lot of money building these tools, so if they decide they no longer want to subsidize them by offering them free, it's their business.
They want devs making Metro apps, not old Win32 C++ apps. If they don't get Metro apps to be built in a big way, Windows 8 tablet edition for human beings 2012 is never going to take off.
It makes sense for Microsoft.
[+] [-] teyc|14 years ago|reply
The only for DevDiv to regain its honour is by reminding Windows Divisino that the oxygen Windows lives on is in DevDiv creating new developers. Given that VS11 Express is only a toy, and requires a presumed $99 annual subscription to deploy, it is going to be difficult for any students to justify.
This civil war is going to maim the Windows ecosystem at a time when it is especially weak.
[+] [-] gouranga|14 years ago|reply
Its rarely because they knowingly like it.
That's the opinion I've managed to deduce after working with over 200 heavy vs users over 10 years.
[+] [-] 27182818284|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucian1900|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wcarss|14 years ago|reply
edit: as my responder points out, I'm incorrect in this assessment -- proposition E fits into the argument just fine. This is the folly of reading comments before having read the article!
[+] [-] daed|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|14 years ago|reply
As a rule of thumb, Windows devs are mentally locked into Visual Studio and GUIs. They do not want to touch the command line. Open source scares them because it's libre & free. It's like some freaky movie where the Alien Software got downloaded into human brains and started issuing commands.
It's like some of these guys don't do computer programming any more. They program Visual Studio using C#. Of course, Visual Studio ain't bad, but the Visual Studio users are pretty rabid.
They would fork over thousands for their addiction.
[+] [-] excuse-me|14 years ago|reply
If they decide that they don't want any apps on Windows other than Office it's their business. But it's a bit of a change from developers-developers-developers!
[+] [-] gouranga|14 years ago|reply
75% of my time writing software is:
* Watching VS crash miserably. It's just seriously unreliable.
* Digging through MSDN trying to find out cryptic errors.
* Desperately trying to debug issues with various black boxes (today was 4 hours on a w3wp crash due to a CLR.dll bug related to stack usage resulting in an interesting session with EDITBIN).
* Dredging through hotfix lists trying to find out which one solved a problem.
* Sitting on the phone for HOURS to MS support who barely speak a work of English these days and don't give a shit - they just want you to fuck off so they can close the case. This is usually because two products won't talk to each other (IE and ClickOnce for example).
* WAITING LITERALLY FUCKING HOURS for things to compile and rebuild.
* Endless fucking updates that take several minutes to apply, sometimes an hour plus. I WANT TO USE MY FUCKING COMPUTER.
Not much:
* solving problems of my own.
Sorry for the rant but that's why it's really dead.
Good riddance.
It's all a "me too" as google and apple have app stores.
Bring on the web for everything.
[+] [-] MortenK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgieporgie|14 years ago|reply
I work on C++ desktop apps, though, and they aren't huge. Your mileage may vary.
[+] [-] keithwarren|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
For developers, they often provided carrots to encourage them in a certain direction. This tended to work sort of well, as there are always large numbers of new CS students expecting the Microsoft-recommended stack to provide a reliable career ticket. Maybe after they saw what Microsoft just did to Silverlight developers and they're not so eager to follow that path.
I never thought that they'd go so far as to actually take the stick to native Win32 developers. How can they not realize how much of their app ecosystem is still built on native code and how much easier it is to get started with that type of development on other platforms?
(In every one of these forums one or two people pop up to say how great this will be for developers and you can still use the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition to write native code or managed code to write C++. This is not correct, that product is crippleware and the managed code stuff is not anything like native C++.)
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
The only requirements are you have to be working on the MS stack, privately held, and making less than a million bucks.
[+] [-] jlarocco|14 years ago|reply
First of all, for the longest time there were no free versions of Visual Studio for producing any kind of application.
Second, even the recent "Express" versions have always been severely crippled. Where were the "No-cost 64-bit development is Dead on Windows 7" when the previous Express versions were released?
The Express versions are more like promotional tools than real versions of VS. For any serious development you'll probably need to buy a VS license anyway.
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
But the command line compilers in the SDK and DDK are a different story.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|14 years ago|reply
You can do serious development with Express, its actually a quite nice and small IDE, great for laptops with capacity issues. If you are doing C# programming on .NET, then really what else do you really need?
[+] [-] smiler|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loso|14 years ago|reply
Even though I can afford the Professional version now, I really don't like to see the way that they are going. I think its boneheaded and might close them off to a new generation of programmers. Open Source and IOS development are already seen as the "cool thing". I don't see how this move gets Microsoft back into the good graces of a younger generation of programmers.
[+] [-] mmcconnell1618|14 years ago|reply
Companies that are willing to take long term risks are not valued in a world of high frequency trading. Balmer is hoping that by force feeding Windows 8 Metro apps down developer throats he will convince Wall Street that Microsoft isn't dead yet.
[+] [-] cobrausn|14 years ago|reply
My bet is most of these developers currently pay for Visual Studio professional versions anyway. So, not much different for them. Seems like the new restrictions are just for hobby development - they'll be forced to make Metro-style apps, which is what they (MS) wants.
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aguynamedrich|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
Not having the 2011 IDE isn't going to affect my productivity anywhere near the degree that a lack of coding expertise does...it's not like I need to rush out and upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. If I have an excuse to skip an upgrade cycle next year, that's fine with me.
Over the long term, I expect Microsoft to continue to provide appropriate tools for the amazing price of free as in beer...again, it's just hard for me to see what someone is complaining about when 2010 Express Edition will continue to be available.
Finally, Reading through the comments, there's very little, "I use VS Express and now I'm screwed." I've played around with Windows Phone SDK, and it's easier to produce something that looks good than with WPF or Forms. Though I hate to say it, switching to all Metro for anything desktop related will probably make me more productive not less.
(edit) If I want to write a command line utility, I'll continue to use powershell.
[+] [-] snorkel|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drhayes9|14 years ago|reply
I don't understand why they would do this. Seems like people will just shrug and migrate towards the free tools that will help them solve a variety of problems in more interesting ways (e.g. gcc, python, ruby, JS, etc.). Then they'll start migrating towards platforms that make it easy to create those solutions (Linux, OSX).
[+] [-] malkia|14 years ago|reply
It's unusual to use something like the WDK for Desktop Apps, but it works.
The compiler is a bit outdated, and there is need for some trickery to get stl7 (internal naming) to work, but if something is missing you can install latest WSDK with it and reuse missing libs/headers from there (platform sdk)
At work I do use VS2010 with .sln/.vcxproj, but for my projects I just stay away from this - either makefiles, shell scripts, or some other tool, but not .sln/.vcxproj
Then again, I don't do much UI stuff, and If I do - I do it in code.
Debugging is there (but a bit harder, then again much more powerful) with WinDBG. There is also OllyDBG.
So WDK + SDK (missing pieces) and I'm set. And since I avoid heavy C++ projects, prefer to stick to C it's not problem for me. Occasionally I have to fix simple problems, like variable not declared at the top of the block, which never "C" compilers are okay, but MSC 15.0 is not (the one from WDK 7.1)
[+] [-] ognyankulev|14 years ago|reply
I hope Ubuntu exploits this opportunity.
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
But I'm sure IBM was thinking "if you're making hardware devices why couldn't you afford $400 for a OS/2 driver developer license?" Like Microsoft's dim early understanding of open source software, completely missing the point.
[+] [-] debacle|14 years ago|reply
Ubuntu is no longer the future of Linux adoption.
[+] [-] jaredsohn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
That thing is crippleware anyway, it can't even produce native 64-bit executables. Raise your hand if you're still on a 32-bit operating system.
[+] [-] gecko|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomfool|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexbell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|14 years ago|reply
Microsoft is in the development tool business and the Express editions were never meant for professional development (open source or not).
[+] [-] thomaslangston|14 years ago|reply
https://www.dreamspark.com/
[+] [-] joelhaasnoot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Locke1689|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|14 years ago|reply
But maybe the .NET SDK keeps being free.
It's a real pity, but well, Visual Studio didn't have a Express version "back then" before the .NET days (think Visual Studio 6)
This may very well be another reason not to use Windows
[+] [-] law|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axusgrad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfosco|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooldeal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stan_rogers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delian66|14 years ago|reply
That is because software development tools like all other software is just data, once written and debugged. Data can be copied at zero cost, which can not be said about physical tools, at least for now.
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|14 years ago|reply
Visual Studio 2010 will continue to work just fine. As will 2008 or even 2005. Anyone with a business license, even a $50 sole proprietorship, can get every piece of software Microsoft makes for zero dollars via free MSDN subscription [1]. This includes licenses for Office, XP/Vista/Win7 home/pro/ultimate, Visual Studio Ultimate, SQL Server, and so on and so forth. The licenses are free forever and ever.
[1] BizSpark program. It's fantastic. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/