What could better than Visual Studio?

How about FREE COPIES of the following tools:
*Visual Basic 2005 Express
*Visual C# 2005 express edition
*Visual Web Developer 2005 Expres edition
*SQL Server 2005 Express edition

All available @ http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

At that price, who needs to settle for inferior "free" software? Get the real deal today!

C++ express is completely fucked up (custom include directories anyone ?), still beta tho, they might fix it one day ^^;

also, in a case you don't know, express editions will cost $40-50 once released, and all betas will cease to work after some time (not announced)

>>3 even for $40 it's not bad, if you look at it from a casual/n00b point of view. If you're a n00b which would you rather deal with; paying $40 for visual basic or trying to set up cygwin and then learning python and then getting disgusted and saying 'fuck it' because your makefiles and programs don't work because, unbeknownst to you whitespace (tabs, space) is part of the laguage used by both make and python.

For the hobbiest programmer, VS/VB is superior.

For the hobbiest programmer, VS/VB is superior.

The people who pass for hobbyists these days...

If you can't even read a tutorial on Python, then VB is far beyond your grasp. Ah, the wonderful arcana of win32.

BTW, most "n00bs" are still in elementary or early high school. For some strange reason I think they'd rather use a free solution.

>If you can't even read a tutorial on Python, then VB is far beyond your grasp.

With python, you don't have a set of pre-built widgets that you can arrange visually and then go back and write the glue code for. It's all-or-nothing. The great thing for casual users is that the visual studio toolset hides most of the complexity from them, thereby making programming more accessible.

>>6
Huh, that's a good argument. I don't buy the all-or-nothing part (I started programming in DOS), but it certainly would reduce the barrier of entry.

There apparently is a Visual Python extension for Visual Studio, but it's an additional $30.

>>4
If you're a n00b and are serious (I mean REALLY serious) about becoming a "computer scientist", install any flavour of Unix instead of being stuck in the Win32 world. Yes, Windows is easy to use but you can't learn anything of what's happening inside, even Darwin is open-source now.

If you don't care about programming... try VB, I don't care, but I don't see the point of wasting your time with it. If you don't want to learn, buy a game console instead, it's more funny.

>> At that price, who needs to settle for inferior "free" software? Get the real deal today!

I love the smell of astroturf in the morning.

>> trying to set up cygwin and then learning python
First of all Python doesn't require cygwin, there is a native port of the interpreter. Always has been.

>>and then getting disgusted and saying 'fuck it' because your makefiles and programs don't work
Second, Python is interpreted, not compiled, and hence doesn't require makefiles.

>>because, unbeknownst to you whitespace (tabs, space) is part of the laguage used by both make and python.
WhiteSpaceIsSignificant is probably the first thing anyone hears about Python. And, y'know, if it really bugs you, it's not the only language out there. I switched to Ruby, not because of the whitespace issue, which really didn't bother me, but because of a whole bunch of little things that added up, not least Python's lameass object system.

So, in conclusion, enjoy your strawman. If you really believe that VB and a shitty IDE are better than gcc and a wealth of languages, more power to you.

oh wow visual studio, look who I will never hire EVER.

>>11 oh wow visual studio, look who will have no problems finding a job with companies who will stay open longer than five minutes.

>>12
Like Google OH WAIT

To be fair, google doesn't exactly depend much on a GUI. Almost all their human-computer interfaces are HTML or Ajax anyway.

YES GOOGLE ARE AJAX

you're a moron. a web page is a graphical user interface. google earth is an application with a GUI. picasa is a ETC ETC ETC.

Furthermore most development these days is serverside. Most jobs I see require php or similar. I reckon >>12 has never actually had a job programming.

or you could use slackware compilers that are better, like for C++ the gnu bloodshed compiler

>>15
A web page is only a GUI when you're using a GUI. HTML was originally meant for markup, not layout.

This is all irrelevant, however. The point was that Google wouldn't use Visual Studio much since they're not using native widgets. Sorry for not being clearer.

At that price, who needs to settle for inferior "free" software? Get the real deal today!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...whoo...good one.

Remind me how MSVC++ still can't comply with the C++ standard after almost ten years? Oooh, or maybe I'll code in C#, the bastard .NET child of Java and C++. And then I'll write some database frontends for SQL Server databases, complete with proprietary SQL extentions that render my application useless on any other SQL application. After that, I'll write up an application or two in Visual Basic, one of the worst programming languages ever devised. But what if some company that runs Unix servers wants to use my product? Too bad! Finally, since I'm too retarded to learn XHTML and CSS, I'll have a web designer output a bunch of shitty code for me that probably breaks on non-IE browsers.

SQL Server is actually decent. Regrettably, porting between DBMS is a PITA...

>Remind me how MSVC++ still can't comply with the C++ standard after almost ten years?

Standards that are not based on production useage are worth ignoring. What matters is real world application; not the approval of the high council of linux fags

>Oooh, or maybe I'll code in C#, the bastard .NET child of Java and C++.

Java is the bastard child of C and C++; C++ is the bastard child of C. Ten years ago luddites were bitching about C++; now you're bitching about Mono. *Yawn*

>>20
>SQL Server is actually decent. Regrettably, porting between DBMS is a PITA...
Isn't this true, regardless of the database you use?

what could be better than visual studio?

Herpes.

>>21 sorry to hear that; don't think you can blame VS for it, tho.

Isn't this true, regardless of the database you use?

Absolutely. I have no issue with SQL Server. Some OSS zealots may beat on it, but it's a decent DMBS. Certainly better for a real DB than MySQL.

That said, if you use SQL Server your options of OS are restricted. What happens if we decide to move the DB between OS in the future? Or what if (as unlikely as it may be) Microsoft discontinues MS-SQL?

This may sound like wankery, but it's my job to ensure risks to business assets are minimized both now and in the future. Such factors do play a role in decision-making.

*DBMS

>> Java is the bastard child of C and C++;

More like Java is the bastard child of C++ and Lisp.

>>26 I stand corrected; but java's still a bastard.

>>27
Total bastard, agreed :D

>>26
Java is more useful.

beyond repair he claimed that this meant  he had a  keyboard shortcut the  keyboard would in  fact be faster  than stupid O.

>>30
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