Visual Studio 2005 Express “free permanently”
April 20th, 2006
Microsoft's "express" set of programming development tools are going to stay free. At the moment, they are time limited.
Dan Fernandez: "We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!
Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free."
I originally downloaded it because I wanted to try out Visual Basic and try to learn a bit. The reason I didn't was because it sounded very much like a free trial that Microsoft was running and that as soon as they decided to charge for it, it'd be impossible to update existing programs without purchasing a license. Without a valid, working copy you've essentially wasted a lot of time which could have been used learning a cross platform language which nobody can take away from you at any time.
I'm still not sure whether these "Express" products will be updated and whether future versions will also be free. These tools can become outdated quite quickly and there is no guarantee Microsoft won't charge in the future. Visual Studio Express tools still don't offer you the same amount of freedom that open cross platform tools can.
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I have downloaded these products before but unfortunately only installed 1 because my downloads wouldn't install on my pc and I had to burn the .iso yadda, yadda. But, overall, they're a strong collection that could compete with the Mac OS X developer tools included in Apple's OS.
One of the disadvantages of Visual Studio Express 2005 is the fact that it does not come bundled with 64 bit compiler support. Now if you have a 64 bit server or workstation you’ll likely want to compile your own 64 bit binaries. I figured out a way to do this using the Platform SDK. Check it out.