Prompt's TechBlog
Express yourself for free with Visual Studio
20 April 2006
Posted by Sean McManus
Microsoft has released a permanently free edition of its development suite Visual Studio Express. The package, which includes Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C# and Visual J#, was previously free for one year. Now you can use it without limitation. The suite complements SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, a permanently free database.
By making this move, Microsoft hopes to attract more amateur developers including beginning game developers. The idea is that they will upgrade to paid tools later on, and their applications will drive demand for Microsoft's operating system.
This is perhaps one indication of the impact that open source software is having on big software corporations. Oracle last year introduced its first free database to encourage developers to begin learning Oracle and create a smooth upgrade path from free databases to enterprise scale software. That said, these developments are still very much free as in 'free beer' rather than 'free speech', with source code strictly off-limits.
By making this move, Microsoft hopes to attract more amateur developers including beginning game developers. The idea is that they will upgrade to paid tools later on, and their applications will drive demand for Microsoft's operating system.
This is perhaps one indication of the impact that open source software is having on big software corporations. Oracle last year introduced its first free database to encourage developers to begin learning Oracle and create a smooth upgrade path from free databases to enterprise scale software. That said, these developments are still very much free as in 'free beer' rather than 'free speech', with source code strictly off-limits.
# posted by Sean McManus at 9:16 AM 
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