> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who 
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of 
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

I once tried it. Couldn't do anything useful with it during a whole 
hour. I uninstalled it. Of course, despite recommendations made by 
Microsoft itself to other developers, the uninstaller didn't remove 
everything that was installed. I was months with lots of filetypes (like 
.c) still associated to VS express.

I use gvim and a bash shell (yes, in Windows) for all my development 
needs. Except for POV-Ray, where I use the internal editor, and for 
Java, where I use Eclipse. MinGW as C compiler.

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> Has some nice features. I sort of got forced into writing something for 
> VC# express because a library supplied by a vendor was using generics, 
> and we're still using ancient VS.NET. (Which is quite bug-ridden)

Ah, .not. I stay away from that. Even though some things look tempting. 
But hey, Vista screenshots with Aero are tempting too (that's the whole 
idea of marketing), and no way in hell I'll downgrade to it.

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"Mike Raiford" <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
news:47a0c3a7$1@news.povray.org...
> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

I've used SQL Express, VS Express C# and web. They're fine for small
development projects. I wouldn't use them in a massive team on a large
commercial project, but for playing around or for smaller things, they're
fine.

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who 
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of 
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

I installed VS C++ 2005, and immediately found that I could not set it 
to assume that all strings were ASCII strings; I had to specifically 
call the API function that is decorated with 'A' to specify that; 
Bloodshed and OpenWatcom allow you to specify the string type with one 
compiler setting, and the compiler automagically decorates them for you.

After editing all of the sources to put in what the compiler will not 
let me assume, it then failed to recognize another API call during the 
link phase.

I already have two C++ compilers that work just fine (Bloodshed and 
OpenWatcom), so getting MS to work is just too much trouble.

Regards,
John

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who 
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of 
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

I used to like it, until I had a chance to see the professional version 
in action.  For whatever reason, the free version is crippled beyond 
belief, speed-wise.  It would literally take more than ten times as long 
to open, load projects, or compile them.  The output would be identical, 
though, so if you're OK with the wait, go for it.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Gail Shaw wrote:
> I've used SQL Express, VS Express C# and web. They're fine for small
> development projects. I wouldn't use them in a massive team on a large
> commercial project, but for playing around or for smaller things, they're
> fine.

What she said.  If it's a one-person project, it's sufficient.  Once you 
start wanting source code control, automatic testing, etc., you'll want 
the for-fee version. (Which, really, isn't that expensive. If your 
employer can't afford a half-day of your pay to get you the tools you 
need, you should be shopping your resume around.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> I installed VS C++ 2005, and immediately found that I could not set it 
> to assume that all strings were ASCII strings

  Really? There's a setting in the project properties for this.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> I used to like it, until I had a chance to see the professional version 
> in action.  For whatever reason, the free version is crippled beyond 
> belief, speed-wise.  It would literally take more than ten times as long 
> to open, load projects, or compile them.

  Strange. I haven't noticed this. I have used both the express version
and the commercial one of VS 2005.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Anybody played with them. I realize there are relatively few on here who 
> actually like MS products, but I want to hear other peoples opinions of 
> MS's free versions of their dev tools.

  I have used it and it seems ok.

  Perhaps a bit strangely at least the express version is not a
"download, install, use" package. Besides downloading and installing
the express version, you have to separately download and install the
Windows Platform SDK and manually configure VS to use it (there doesn't
seem to be any way to make it automatically detect that you have the SDK
installed and to use it properly). If you do anything that needs DirectX,
you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and manually configure
VS to use it (again, it doesn't seem to detect this automatically). All
this can be a real pain, especially since it doesn't seem to be documented
anywhere. Without precise instructions on how to do this, it can be next
to impossible to figure it out.
  (I have only experience with VS 2005 Express. I don't know if they
have improved this with VS 2008.)

  Once you have succeeded in installing and configuring everything,
it seem to work ok, though.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   Perhaps a bit strangely at least the express version is not a
> "download, install, use" package. Besides downloading and installing
> the express version, you have to separately download and install the
> Windows Platform SDK and manually configure VS to use it (there doesn't
> seem to be any way to make it automatically detect that you have the SDK
> installed and to use it properly). If you do anything that needs DirectX,
> you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and manually configure
> VS to use it (again, it doesn't seem to detect this automatically). All
> this can be a real pain, especially since it doesn't seem to be documented
> anywhere. Without precise instructions on how to do this, it can be next
> to impossible to figure it out.

I found this a little odd also. And a little frustrating, because my 
experience with dev tools like this is *very* limited (i.e., this and 
XCode), so I wasn't even sure if I was doing the right thing. In light 
of Nicolas' post, this process took me rather longer than one hour, and 
I hadn't even managed to compile anything yet. But, as you say, once 
it's working, seems to be OK.

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