A few words on Windows Vista and Visual Studio
Let me just jump right in and say that I was absolutely delighted to find out that Microsoft would keep the Express editions of the Visual Studio tools free. I had written about this a year ago, and although I was way too early with that, it is good to see Microsoft now really doing it. When they launched Visual Studio 2005, they first said that the Express editions of the tools would be free for only one year, but now they’ll be free permanently.
I can’t even begin to explain how devastating this is going to be for the competition on various levels. Not only on the short term, but most importantly on the long term. Visual Studio Express has now been downloaded over 5 million times. And I’m willing to bet most of those downloads are from young programmers and students who are just starting out to learn programming. When these people are going to look for a job in a few years, in what environment do you think they will write their applications? That’s right, .NET and Visual Studio. Which database are they going to be using? SQL Server ofcourse, because they’ve been used to writing their applications for SQL Server Express all those years. I know the tools for Linux are also free, but there are two issues I can immediately think of there. Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows. If you are starting to write programs and you want to show off your application to as many people as possible, you’re going to be choosing Windows (sadly, this also applies to virus writers). And secondly, the tools available for Linux don’t come even close to the functionality, ease of use and integration Visual Studio offers.
With all those young programmers starting to check out Visual Studio and .NET now, think of the long term implications. This is one of the most important reasons now why Java is destined to lose from .NET as a platform, and why SQL Server is going to continue to gain marketshare in the future.
On the short term, you will see many applications being released by young programmers who are starting out and are experimenting with Visual Studio Express and things like Windows Live. This is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. Not only do Microsoft release all these cool new technologies and toys, they now also release the development tools free of charge so people can download them and just have at it. And most of this is beautifully and almost seamlessly integrated. Imagine what this will do for the richness of the .NET and Windows (Live) platform especially with regard to software. Google should be worried.
I could go on and on. But since this is a quick post, I’ll save that for a future longer article. I now want to talk about Windows Vista briefly. The last part of Paul Thurrott’s Windows Vista February 2006 CTP review generated quite some discussion on the Internet. Basically Paul says that he’s not very happy, and indeed a bit disappointed with Windows Vista at the moment, all while cleverly leaving an opening to change his mind in the future. While Paul does bring up some valid points, most of them are inherent to beta software and I don’t know why one would give such an in dept review and complain about things in a beta version of a product, as if it was already the final thing. Such is the case with for example the fact that you can’t know which window has the focus because they all look the same. I’m sure Microsoft is aware of that, Paul, don’t worry. They are still working on it, you know.
I haven’t posted anything on Windows Vista for a long while now since my first post, and this is precisely the reason why not. I also worked with the February CTP version, and yes it was slow, yes I didn’t have the drivers for the videocard on my laptop so it sucked and yes there are bugs. But it’s business as usual for a beta and complaining about it in public doesn’t make much sense. One thing I do have to say is that I feel that the quality of the beta releases has been a bit lower than previous versions of Windows, especially with the first Beta 1 release. But this could be related to the major rewrites of many low level parts of Windows like the kernel and networking stack.
I do agree with Paul when he complains about the many features that were promised, but were taken out, and are probably still being taken out. The most important one being WinFS. Still, there are a lot of really good changes, most of them under the hood, that I can be very excited about. I think it is too early though, to give my opinion on Windows Vista as a product, so you’ll have to wait for that until I’ve been able to install a near RTM version on my systems.
Comments
There’s one response. Follow any responses to this post through its comments RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.