Visual Studio Community Edition...
This is pretty big news. At least for those of us developers who use and love Visual Studio but don't want to go through illegal downloads to get it on our personal computers.
In many ways this is actually bigger than the news about .Net being open sourced (though, in others ways, less important).
One of the items that makes this so big is that it brings almost everything the very expensive versions have to hobbyists, etc... free of charge, where it normally would have been insanely expensive. .Net on the other hand was always free, just closed source. And, what this brings potentially means people using free editions where they might have paid, so a potential loss of revenue. Again, .Net had no direct revenue associated with it. So going open source has less direct impact on bottom line.
On a personal level I think, the 2 biggest things it brings are the ability to open any type of project within a single installed instance of the IDE and the ability to use extensions.
In the past Microsoft released several versions of their Express level of Visual Studio. Ones for Web, Desktop, Windows Store and Windows Phone. While unlikely that a single project for a hobbyist would contain all four, regularly projects contained a mix. I dabbled with Web and Desktop for instance. This meant 2 separate installs and if I tried to include projects from one in the solution to the other, annoying error messages.
This was by no means a deal breaker. I enjoy Visual Studio more than its competitors, and by a long shot. For the few cases where I needed to split a what should have been one solution into 2 it was simply a necessary evil. But it was a pain. And the fact that I could legally download all 4 and run them at the same time always begged the question as to why split them out? Devs are used to hacking their environment in just the right way to make it work... even when they have the proper tools. This just always seemed like a way to tick people off for no reason. If I were permitted to have only one installed at a time it would have posed a "real" barrier some might have paid to get past (or driven others away).
For many, myself included, the other big one is support for extensions. This was the gaping hole VS Express. Many tutorials would assume a pro level of VS and reference tools that were only available as VS extensions. Even when there were alternatives, they were typically not as good as what could be had in extension form (both quality in general and VS integration).
As an example, I use WiX since MS decided to stop supporting their own install project types after VS 2010. Prior to this version though, I had to add a dummy project to bootstrap the build in and had to hand crank all of the very boring XML and command line parameters. If I do any new projects however, I should be able to reinstall WiX and have it register the extension with Visual Studio and then create the appropriate project directly in VS. This causes boilerplate XML to be generated, automatically calls to appropriate command line to build the app (including switches to dependent WiX libraries) and generally makes life very nice and easy.
There are other reasons to be happy about this news. And which pieces are most exciting will vary from person to person. But this is indeed good news. And the news about Visual Studio 2015 is even more exciting. Not sure I will ever write a serious app that leverages the Android emulator... but that sort of multi-platform direction is also quite interesting and exciting.
In many ways this is actually bigger than the news about .Net being open sourced (though, in others ways, less important).
One of the items that makes this so big is that it brings almost everything the very expensive versions have to hobbyists, etc... free of charge, where it normally would have been insanely expensive. .Net on the other hand was always free, just closed source. And, what this brings potentially means people using free editions where they might have paid, so a potential loss of revenue. Again, .Net had no direct revenue associated with it. So going open source has less direct impact on bottom line.
On a personal level I think, the 2 biggest things it brings are the ability to open any type of project within a single installed instance of the IDE and the ability to use extensions.
In the past Microsoft released several versions of their Express level of Visual Studio. Ones for Web, Desktop, Windows Store and Windows Phone. While unlikely that a single project for a hobbyist would contain all four, regularly projects contained a mix. I dabbled with Web and Desktop for instance. This meant 2 separate installs and if I tried to include projects from one in the solution to the other, annoying error messages.
This was by no means a deal breaker. I enjoy Visual Studio more than its competitors, and by a long shot. For the few cases where I needed to split a what should have been one solution into 2 it was simply a necessary evil. But it was a pain. And the fact that I could legally download all 4 and run them at the same time always begged the question as to why split them out? Devs are used to hacking their environment in just the right way to make it work... even when they have the proper tools. This just always seemed like a way to tick people off for no reason. If I were permitted to have only one installed at a time it would have posed a "real" barrier some might have paid to get past (or driven others away).
For many, myself included, the other big one is support for extensions. This was the gaping hole VS Express. Many tutorials would assume a pro level of VS and reference tools that were only available as VS extensions. Even when there were alternatives, they were typically not as good as what could be had in extension form (both quality in general and VS integration).
As an example, I use WiX since MS decided to stop supporting their own install project types after VS 2010. Prior to this version though, I had to add a dummy project to bootstrap the build in and had to hand crank all of the very boring XML and command line parameters. If I do any new projects however, I should be able to reinstall WiX and have it register the extension with Visual Studio and then create the appropriate project directly in VS. This causes boilerplate XML to be generated, automatically calls to appropriate command line to build the app (including switches to dependent WiX libraries) and generally makes life very nice and easy.
There are other reasons to be happy about this news. And which pieces are most exciting will vary from person to person. But this is indeed good news. And the news about Visual Studio 2015 is even more exciting. Not sure I will ever write a serious app that leverages the Android emulator... but that sort of multi-platform direction is also quite interesting and exciting.
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