Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition C++ 2008: sweeeeet

I've downloaded this free product from Microsoft. As opposed to the old "learning" editions of VB in the 1990s which were brain damaged and cost 100.00, this product, along with C Sharp and VB editions, is a full development environment. It's hard for me to justify the much higher price for the enterprise editions.

Microsoft is being forced to do this by Open Source. Perhaps to ensure that the free edition doesn't eat into enterprise sales, Microsoft's publicists are, it seems, very careful to portray the product as Kiddie Fun Time, encouraging programmers to think exclusively of home and game products.

But a product which gives me Intellisense even in C++, optimized code, portable executables, etc., is a real development environment and can be used in small companies without having to buy an enterprise edition.

Unfortunately, the willingness of people to work as virtual slaves, creating open source, creates new value in contradiction to laissez-faire theory, coming from a company which honestly pays its employees, and has done so since 1980.

The question is whether this is sustainable. Microsoft cannot return to the days of old, and do business strictly within the US, giving away the store. It's being forced to compete with an IBM that may have stolen Linux from SCO, and internationally its products are seen as US-centric.

It's a smart move for Microsoft to open up development labs in Asia for this reason.

I tried to use the C++ edition to make the Kernighan-Pike regular expression code work in a .Net form, to do time comparisions for my previous blog essay, but found no clear way of translating an sbyte array to and from a .Net string.

But when I called up a command line application, C++ VSE gave me a running hello world. It had the bug-feature of earlier editions in that when you run it inside the development environment, the MS DOS window just flashes and goes away. But it was easy to modify this with the Pike code, compile to the Release folder, and run in an MS-DOS window.

I'd like an excuse to do Bjarne Stroustrup level code in C++ because of the range of this language from extremely high level to Von Neumann level but probably won't have the time.