Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools?

Does it seriously have to get to the point where you have to give your tools away for new developers to tinker with them? Mircrosoft is giving away to students a full version of Visual Studio Professional Edition. About f*ck'n time, but if they really wanted to save face they would open up that offer to everybody.

They claim that there tools are more powerful, honestly any tool is powerful in the right hands, whether it is from the Cathedral Microsoft camp or the Bazaar Open-source camp.

Slashdot.org 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."

Tools are tools, and Microsoft has tools a plenty. I would burn this, on my Mac in a virtual partition to test drive it, compare it to GNU and cc of the UNIX world and maybe come away with, Eclipse


Eclipse?

• free


• open source


• mature


• interactive IDE (code completion, debugging, refactoring)


• supports multiple languages


• Eclipse Rich Client Platform


• easily customizable, modifiable, pluggable, more..

Mac Specific Development

With the Mac, the story is diffrent, and it is far from "standard" its enviorment is a hybrid of BSD UNIX and the GUIness of Windows, or vice versa. Macs are, well made and their OS really works well and solid. Like Linux we have had zero downtimes with these machines.

Game development seems amiss as the Mac is geared to just contemporary development. The tools are not "obvious" and may require some digging into the machine to find the right development tools, but they are there.

Macs do things just a tad diffrent than PCs, and its main interface has specilized tools Carbon and Coco that spins a slightly diffrent syntax than the core C++, but the Mac is capable of C++ programming with the C++ Tool framework.

We find that the development should be done through the OS's XCode, but the user is free to go the Linuxy gcc/subversion route, XCode gives a efficient veiw of the code, the source and binaries all in one place.

Macs are not known to be "game machines" but they are certainly capable of becoming them. OpenGL's direct compeditor DirectX obviously does not play well with the Mac platform. The only real way to "develop" with the .NET, XNA and DirectX suite is to either to install VMWare or Parrlles to actually run Windows or install Mono (the open source port to the .NET platform)

Ubuntu Linux

For a change of pace we are exploring Ubuntu, a Linux distribution that has a Mac like quality. Since it has raised such a ruckus we want to see for ourselves.

Ubuntu is, at the time of this writing at version 7. The first time I personally installed it on my friends mini laptop it actually was pretty decent. Audio fired up without a hitch...Video, well was a bit more involved and complicated and required additional downloading and installing of the necessary CODECs because of the DMCA/MPAA bullshit.

Necessary evil, I suppose :/

....not

Linux will be a more influential Operating System without the encumbrance of any "commercial ties" that you have with Windows or even the Mac. With Vista being closed and still security "weak" by our standards and Mac, while still officially closed is close enough to an open-source model of the old standard UNIX/BSD to reference from.

It has more freedoms to do anything you want with it. One of our crew, is doing wonders with X. For a person who hates Graphical User Interfaces, being a line-command junkie its the best Graphical User Interface I have ever seen.

Stay tuned to our reports.