Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Dean Harding — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:06:53 GMT

The OEM option sounds ideal. Most of the people who start out programming at a young age are doing it to program games (hell, that's how I started!) so it would be quite attractive, methinks.

VS Should be Part of Windows

Jesse Ezell Blog — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:29:52 GMT

Jeroen van den Bos has made the case for adding VS to Windows. [1] Dan Fernandez responds by saying [2]:

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

danielfe — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 04:29:40 GMT

I figured I should to Jesse's blog post (comments are disabled on his) where he thinks that besides the legal reasons, this is a "cop-out"

I'd be curious how he would service Visual Studio Expres given that it doesn't use the Windows infrastructure. The fact that Windows and Visual Studio don't use the same servicing infrastructure adds a surprising amount of work. It's fair to blame Microsoft on this one (why don't we have a unified way to develop, service and localize software?), but it's not fair to say that there's no work involved. Would you have Vista slip to add developer tools that are freely downloadable on the Web?

I also think the comparison to Linux doesn't really make sense. The primary distribution mechanism for Linux is through download and the level of sophistication of the average Windows user versus average Linux user is completely different. For our more sophisticated customers, we provide pre-built, pre-configured virtual PCs which provide a Linux distro-like experience. If customers are already downloading their operating system, than they can certainly download Express just the same.

It would be interesting to get the non-developer perspective on this issue for a more balanced viewpoint.

Thanks,
-Dan

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

danielfe — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 04:45:07 GMT

Oops, forgot to mention that the mechanism the example he suggests, AOL, is one that is done by *OEMs* and no, AOL is not built into the Windows operating system. The OEM model is exactly the one I advocated. Also, you should know that OEMs aren't in the business of adding free software just for fun. AOL pays money to get their product as a base install on a Dell/HP/etc image. Given that Express is free, it becomes more challenging to be integrated into an OEM image, but not impossible as long as it provides unique value (ex: Game Developer).

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Jared Evans — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 05:12:21 GMT

Dan,

You have http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/ however the problem with this is that it really tells you all about products not made by Microsoft.

What you really need is a good page where it lists hot products made by Microsoft, the other day there was a MSN space (http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC910C9F7F3!1231.entry) that listed a majority of the free software that Microsoft provides. Build something like this, make it a default link in IE7. have it so that you can easily find downloads from MS:R or the DN or Microsoft Game Studios. Make it all rounded, have the front page showing whats hot.

http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=gb&lc=en&ver=4000&template=ph1&zone=ph take a look at this page. see the flash menu thing where it has "Win Back Time", "Never Miss a Shot" etc etc do this show off Linq, show off Halo 3, show off Microsoft Scoreboard.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Tzury Bar Yochay — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 05:45:29 GMT

Well, when you have (in XP) media center,home and professional edition, you expect to get from the *professsional* more than just have it connectable to a domain. A preinstalled development platform will do this I guess.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Jeff Key — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 06:05:22 GMT

Why not start a "cool things I can do with my Windows computer" community site? Let people add programs, websites, etc. Include tagging and voting. Have a link to _this_ somewhere in Vista's start menu. People interested in programming (or anything else) can get immediate access to MS's offerings as well as anyone else's. (Make legal happy.) And you give people easy access to client-side apps, which is pretty rare these days w/everything on the web. Apps on the client feed the cash cow.

Egads! DON'T Bundle VS.NET with VISTA!!

Karl Seguin [MVP] — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:58:45 GMT

So there's a discussion going around about bundling a form of VS.NET (likely some Express Edition) with...

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

BarryD — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 19:09:06 GMT

Interestingly I asked Developer Platform Evangelism UK a couple of weeks back for some CDs with Express on to give out at user group meetings.

Apparently the descision was made within Microsoft to only distribute via downloads. So I now face the problem of do I burn some CDs myself, or do I not care about users losing the momentum and just hope that they will bother when they get home.

(I'm currently involved in starting up a user group in a UK university town, we had the idea of a beginners session first and a more in depth session as the second session on the night and using Express to build a project over a year. We thought it would be nice to give the students an alternative to just Java)

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

danielfe — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 19:32:30 GMT

Thanks Barry for the heads up. While we no longer have the "box product" available, anyone internally, like the UK Evangelist can order Express CDs for their local geography to hand out to you, your user group or anyone else. I'll try to sync up with the UK team and see what the miscommunication is here.

Thanks,
-Dan

Pas de Visual Studio Express intégré à Windows Vista

CoqBlog — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 23:30:52 GMT

Je vous avais parler il y a quelques temps d'un post de Jeroen van den Bos&nbsp;s'interrogeant sur &nbsp;l'intégration...

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

nrolland — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 01:18:10 GMT

<< Legal: No really, this was an issue. I'm not going into details, but this is a "deal-breaker" if you will. >>

Legal department VS business ?
If this really is the case, there should be some serious layoff. How can Microsoft as a business accepts that a department who does not produce value harm branches of the very same company that pays them ?

<< Setup: Dropping bits on a CD is an easy task .. >>

Well.. what's the drawback of just doing so ?

OK I'll go to the bottom line, concrete example of the stake at hands here :

I run a trading desk with billions dollars of assets.
So there are big incentives to manage IT things well...

Nonetheless :
- Everyone uses VBA
- Dotnet is completely unknown. The IT is very reluctant on deploying it.... while many critical systems rely on it !
I talked to a knowledgeable dev guy who works in RD department about dotnet. when I mentioned 2.0 he said :
"yes we might be able to receive 1.1 next year, but not 2.0" while, 6 months ago, I had the IT to deploy 2.0 at the trading side where all the critical apps are.

Dotnet is there, but no one knows it exists.
I mean even the name is unheard of by the masses.
And there is no chance a Mort on the business side will have it installed by a Mort on the IT side.

The only way to overcome this is to have it by default.
Otherwise in 10 years you'll still have dirty VBA apps and people looking at you strangely when talking about dotnet.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

nrolland — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 01:21:41 GMT

PS: AFAIK, to install it you need administrators rights....
you can always dream corporate IT policies allows that.

So not having VS Express by default is a show stopper... for DotNet popularity !

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Jon Galloway — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 11:07:02 GMT

I really like your "Better" solution - a Start menu item that downloads the latest version - for much more than Windows Marketplace. Pretty much no one seems to know what that "Windows Catalog" link is for, and it's really not doing the job.

It would be great to have a "Get More Programs" folder on the start menu with categorized free downloadable programs. They'd preferably be ClickOnce apps as they become available, but even just direct links to download pages would do the trick, and non-Microsoft links would be designated. Yes, non-Microsoft links. Please oh please, if you can't ship Paint.NET (http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/01/14/435326.aspx), at least link to it.

I just helped our babysitter set up her new laptop as she's getting ready to head off to college (sigh). The first step of this process, as we all know, is to rip all the OEM bundled junk off the machine. That's why an OEM install is less than ideal. They get paid to load too much junk on these machines, to the Dell L33T G@M3RZ Edition would also come with so much crapware (see the growing list here: http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/) that the first thing anyone who's likely to know enough to crack open VS Express would do is wipe the drive and reinstall. The OEM solution sounds good in a conference room, but I don't think it would work.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Dean Harding — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 02:32:08 GMT

> Legal department VS business ?
> If this really is the case, there should be some serious layoff. How can Microsoft
> as a business accepts that a department who does not produce value harm branches
> of the very same company that pays them ?

Why? The problem is not that legal don't WANT them to. It's that the legal department understands that as soon as they start bundling it, the EU would be demanding a version without it, Borland and Sun and all the other competing companies would be suing for "misuse of a monopoly" and so on.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Dave — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 02:39:36 GMT

Fantasic idea, behind it 100%, but if you are interested in getting Kids programming by exposing them to this stuff by default then you can't just target the 'Ultimate' edition.

I don't know if too many parents that are going to cough for the top of the line OS for their kids PC.

Why not include the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions in Windows Vista?

Aaron Stebner's WebLog — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:58:33 GMT

An interesting "philosophical" question was posed recently that I just noticed over this past weekend...

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Niall — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:49:20 GMT

nrolland:

It's mainly banks that are so behind the times with software as you describe. They're afraid of security and stability. What works today will work tomorrow, what's new tomorrow might not work for some time.

This is why the bank I work in is rolling out a new desktop application build with Office 2003 and XP SP 2 (which you need for .Net 2.0) by sometime near the end of this year. Supposedly. For the moment, we have to sidestep guidelines/rules just to be able to set up a development environment to write software for the bank. And I'm still using Office 2000.

Can you imagine how long it will be before we have Vista and Office 2007? Probably 2010 at the earliest. I don't think including the latest versions of development environments in the latest versions of windows will change much, because by the time the machines are upgraded, the versions are already ancient and pushing the end of their MS support timeline.

Most of the IT management here, if not all, are Java server people. They don't know when new versions of .Net come out, they don't know what the new versions do, they don't know which version of VS to buy. There is plenty of opportunity for MS to make inroads into this culture in the same way as they seem to have broken into universities lately. I wish they would.

Jeroen’s weblog » Express in Vista redux

Jeroen’s weblog » Express in Vista redux — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:09:04 GMT

PingBack from http://jvdb.org/blog/2006/08/15/express-in-vista-redux/

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Jon Galloway — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:36:06 GMT

I really like your “Better” solution - a Start menu item that downloads the latest version - for much more than Windows Marketplace. Pretty much no one seems to know what that “Windows Catalog” link is for, and it’s really not doing the job.

It would be great to have a “Get More Programs” folder on the start menu with categorized free downloadable programs. They’d preferably be ClickOnce apps as they become available, but even just direct links to download pages would do the trick, and non-Microsoft links would be destgnated Yes, non-Microsoft links (fine, put in a bunch of disclaimers). Please oh please, if you can’t ship Paint.NET
(http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/01/14/435326.aspx), at least link to it.

I just helped our babysitter set up her new laptop as she’s getting ready to head off to college (sigh). The first step of this process, as we all know, is to rip all the OEM bundled junk off the machine. That’s why an OEM install is less than ideal. They get paid to load too much junk on these machines, to the Dell L33T G@M3RZ Edition would also come with so much crapware (see the growing list here:
http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/) that anyone who’s tech saavy enough to crack open VS Express would be likely to just wipe the drive and reinstall. The OEM solution sounds good in a conference room, but I don’t think it would work in the real world.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Mohammed Shareef — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:28:53 GMT

I do understand that there might be limitations such as legal etc with including the express edition but I dont agree with the discoverability part.
If the user is provided with something he is more than likely to use it or at least discover it sooner or later. What example are we giving to the community out there when we say that at some point there is going to be a managed version of windows in .NET but are not really setting the tone up for it. Adding the express editions would definitely in my point of view evoke interest even if one doesnt know about it. Think about the Unix/Linux flavours ,they tend to have some kind of programming editors

Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 19:39:06 GMT

My good friend Dan writes a post about why Visual Studio shouldn't be part of Windows, in response to...

Visual Studio Express shipped as part of the operating system

Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:25:13 GMT

When I saw that there had been discussions about shipping Visual Studio Express as part of Windows Vista....

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

it's me — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:51:01 GMT

i'm dreaming of a nice software catalog that gets internet-updated - with different categories like "media, development" - not only for visual studio, also for programs like movie maker..

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Wesley Parish — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 16:18:14 GMT

What I'm thinking of is a pack of Express cds that you could throw in as an extra, if the user is buying it for A: gaming; B: studenting; C: software development; D: system/network administration.

Of course, to really compete with Linux and the free *nixes, you would want to be able to offer the source code, under a suitable license, say the Microsoft Community License, as well ...

Have a think about it.

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Michael — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 09:36:06 GMT

offer the source code, really how many people are truly reading the linux source code? I am not and yes, I am a developer. I would like to see any edition of visual studio be bundled into vista. Think about it, vista will be distributed via DVD, just put the express edition on the DVD, and pop up a window to ask if install visual studio express while the user putting the DVD into a vista machine. (apple bundle the full xcode into OS X, it is on the DVD but not been installed by default.)

Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

VS Should be Part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Egads! DON'T Bundle VS.NET with VISTA!!

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Pas de Visual Studio Express int&#233;gr&#233; &#224; Windows Vista

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Why not include the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions in Windows Vista?

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Jeroen’s weblog » Express in Vista redux

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Visual Studio Express shipped as part of the operating system

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

re: Response: Visual Studio should be part of Windows

Pas de Visual Studio Express intégré à Windows Vista