How Cool is Microsoft's Community Edition of Visual Studio?
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InfoWorld looks at Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition to see for whom it is going to be appealing and what limitations we need to be on the look out for.
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The commercial limitation sucks. A lot of standard business app design does not need all the extra features of Professional.
Did VS Express in prior versions have the same license restriction? I never looked as I have always had Professional.
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I do not believe that Express had those limitations. It was just more "limited" making it unpopular for usage by groups that would want to do commercial work of any scale.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I do not believe that Express had those limitations. It was just more "limited" making it unpopular for usage by groups that would want to do commercial work of any scale.
This mean in house company people cannot just use VS Express to make a quicky internal application. I mean they can use Community, and it is not like they will be tracked down really, but it IS a license violation and will be found if the company gets a full audit.
Long ago, VS Express was how I got started actually coding beyond VBA. I took something I was doing in VBA inside Excel and ported it out to an application.
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Seems like a fairly random definition of "Enterprise":
If you are an enterprise, your employees and contractors may not use the software to develop or test your applications, except for open source and education purposes as permitted above. An “enterprise” is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) more than one million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues
I have far fewer than 250 PCs and we only have two developers but we fail on the $1m revenue. I've never heard of a licence restriction based on revenue before? Have you?
I only need the software to develop a few reports on our MS Dynamics ERP system.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Seems like a fairly random definition of "Enterprise":
I have far fewer than 250 PCs and we only have two developers but we fail on the $1m revenue. I've never heard of a licence restriction based on revenue before? Have you?
We have a few vendors who do. It's suppose to help out the SMBs.
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It might help out the 'S's in SMB but not the 'M's. How many medium sized companies have a revenue less than $1m? Even a company with just 25 employees earning an average of $40k each, which I'd consider very much a "small" company, is going to have a wage bill alone of $1m.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
It might help out the 'S's in SMB but not the 'M's. How many medium sized companies have a revenue less than $1m? Even a company with just 25 employees earning an average of $40k each, which I'd consider very much a "small" company, is going to have a wage bill alone of $1m.
We have companies with 300 employee's around here that don't make more than $20,000 in annual profit.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Seems like a fairly random definition of "Enterprise":
If you are an enterprise, your employees and contractors may not use the software to develop or test your applications, except for open source and education purposes as permitted above. An “enterprise” is any organization and its affiliates who collectively have either (a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) more than one million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in annual revenues
I have far fewer than 250 PCs and we only have two developers but we fail on the $1m revenue. I've never heard of a licence restriction based on revenue before? Have you?
I only need the software to develop a few reports on our MS Dynamics ERP system.
I feel like I've seen revenue licensing before, but I might be imagining it. Odd things start to show up when attempting to limit the use of "free".
It's definitely their own definition of "enterprise", that's for sure. IBM goes completely the opposite way and doesn't consider you even an SMB until you are around 500 seats. Below that IBM classifies you as a hobby or not existing (more the latter.)
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
It might help out the 'S's in SMB but not the 'M's. How many medium sized companies have a revenue less than $1m? Even a company with just 25 employees earning an average of $40k each, which I'd consider very much a "small" company, is going to have a wage bill alone of $1m.
We have companies with 300 employee's around here that don't make more than $20,000 in annual profit.
There are Fortune 100s with many tens of thousands of employees with zero profits (because they are losing money.) But gross revenue it is nearly impossible to have 300 employees, not be out of business and not have over a million coming in.
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Visual Studio is pretty nice.. I used to do programming in VB6, but then dotNet came along and just ruined that experience for me. A couple of months ago, I tried some VB.Net stuff to help a friend, and it is back to its former glory of being simple and easy again...
There's a few halfway decent looking Free / OpenSource IDEs that aim to be similar... SharpDevelop has worked well for my simple needs.
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@dafyre said:
Visual Studio is pretty nice.. I used to do programming in VB6, but then dotNet came along and just ruined that experience for me. A couple of months ago, I tried some VB.Net stuff to help a friend, and it is back to its former glory of being simple and easy again...
There's a few halfway decent looking Free / OpenSource IDEs that aim to be similar... SharpDevelop has worked well for my simple needs.
Move to C#, things are even easier. BASIC language constructs are not the most clear and easy to use. It was originally designed for learning, not for using.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Move to C#, things are even easier. BASIC language constructs are not the most clear and easy to use. It was originally designed for learning, not for using.
And learn, I did.... So much so that when I look at code written in C#, it leaves me going: Wha? If it's Visual C#, I can poke my way around it a little bit. I'm getting better at it, but I'm generally goingto write web apps in PHP and Windows Apps (rarely written at all these days) in VB.
