Visual Basic Express: Well, This Is Interesting...
...it is free. It (unlike former "learning editions") compiles real classes. AND, it appears to compile most of the compiler in my book.
I was supposed to get an eval copy of Visual Studio 2005 by way of a Microsoft MVP but this has been held up somehow and the eval copy is probably sitting in the airport in Shanghai while the homeys check it out.
This contributed to my decision to abandon new .Net development and migrate to pure C, and my own language spinoza.
However, I did still need a way at work to make demos for my students, so I went fishing at www.microsoft.com for Free VeeBee. I would have willingly obtained VB-5 or even 4 for my purposes. VB-3 would have been amusing.
Imagine my surprise when I was able to download what looks like a full scale .Net development tool, aimed at but not restricted to newbies, this Visual Basic Express thing.
It linked straight away with no back-talk to my large library of VB support tools (utilities.DLL), and, it fully supports something we had in VB-6 but lost until now in VB .Net: real ability to modify source code in debugging.
Do I detect the fine Italian hand of a certain Bill Gates and his tragic love affair with Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code? I mean, I can just see Ballmer marshalling resources for this baby, by knocking C# developers upside the head until they consented to make Bill happy.
Or is this thing intended to be a sort of Kiddie Trainer? If so, somebunny should tell Bill that my 26000 line compiler isn't kid stuff yet seems to compile using this Moth, this Piper Cub (more details on this will be forthcoming).
Or did Microsoft do this because Bill reads my blog and got wind of my plan to start a rebellion on Lamma Island against The Force? Nawwwww....
Dammit, I still like old VeeBee, forms, controls, code yippee. I also loved the barebones world of pure or *reinen* (*zuivere* for all you Dutch gals out there) coding using Notepad and Dave Hansen's Local C Compiler. I ALSO liked assembler language on the eye bee emm 1401.
To be so small-c catholic means you are a large G Geek. After we blow ourselves to Kingdom Come I will be down by the river making a computer out of water channels and leaves, spinning on twig pinwheels.
Thanks for the heads up
I figured anything "free" would have marketing motivations. Fortunately, my goal is to improve my compiler and write demos of English parsing for English students, computer operations for CS students, and illustrations of Platonic nonsense for philosophy students.
A caution and a 'remote data' hack
One of the restrictions with the Express Editions is that it seems to work only with SQL 2005 (Express or otherwise). Note that SQL 2005 Express is also a freebie licensed for commercial use. I wasn't really paying attention to that and connected to an existing MSDE (SQL 2000) database. Everything worked fine until I tried to use SQL 2000 tools to maintain that database. It seems that the 2K tools no longer recognized it as a valid database. So be more careful than I was.
Another restriction, and this one is better documented, is that the Express Editions of Visual Studio can work with local data sources only. There is a rather nice little hack around that limitation. Specifically, SQL 2005 Express (that freebie mentioned above) is perfectly capable of creating cross-database and cross-server views. Doing so effectively 'localizes' remote data from VS Express' point of view. Note that this may also effectively remove the apparent restriction to work with only SQL 2005 data.