Free VB, but why?

Why is Microsoft giving away Visual Basic Express and other Development languages in the Visual Studio Express Suite (that is, apart from any conspiracy theories).

There are a number of Editions of Visual Studio 2005, and the Express Edition is the most limited (it's really basic).

The other editions, according to this link are:

Visual Studio Standard Edition
Visual Studio Professional Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team System

So, why the free Express edition? Simple, apart from trying to attract first time
programmers and hobbyist programmers to Visual Studio .Net. There are still a large number of hobbyist programmers using Visual Basic 6. This is one way Microsoft is trying to entice them to get into .Net Development. They will of course need at least the Professional Edition to develop full blown applications, but the Express Edition is a free introduction.

Free Microsoft Visual Basic!

Well, Visual Basic (.Net) 2005 Express that is.

It was announced some time ago that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition would be free (MS's attempt way to counter MySQL, FireBird and all the other free database engines).

Now Microsoft is giving away the Express Editions of Visual Studio free for one year.

Of course there is a catch - these development tools will only run on Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista (previously known as Longhorn).

The free Visual Studio Express products which are available are:

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
Visual J# 2005 Express Edition

Mirror Blog

This blog is a mirror of the venerable Techno Files blog, mainly for testing new templates etc.