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Express is discontinued going forward according to VS website: "*Visual Studio Express 2017 is available for Windows Desktop developers. This will be the final

Express is discontinued going forward according to VS website: "*Visual Studio Express 2017 is available for Windows Desktop developers. This will be the final version of Visual Studio Express, and there will not be a UWP or Web offering of Visual Studio Express 2017. We encourage all users to look at the free development options offered by Microsoft such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Community for future development needs." Community has license restrictions that were not in place for express versions. There is also a build tools package now which has the compiler without an IDE, but i'm not clear on the licensing for it.

pjmlp 9y ago
The only license restrictions on community are for companies with more than 5 developers. Any larger company can surely afford professional licenses. When I started on IT we had to buy everything, just like on other professions.
- cwyers 9y ago
  I love contrasting threads like this with the outraged threads over "why aren't companies contributing to open source products that they use?" It makes it very, very clear that there is a large segment of the free software community that is only here for the "free as in beer" part, which is why it's so hard to get funding for a lot of important open source projects.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Yes, I fully agree with you.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    If you "love these threads" so much, you might just be chronically misunderstanding people. The problem is that no matter how far MSVC goes, those with old licenses for one reason or another tend to bring down the lowest common denominator. I would have no qualms buying a VS Professional/Enterprise license and upgrading it if I were in that position, but I can not very well stand on my pulpit demanding that everyone else do so. The great thing about the free compilers is that there are enough disparate incentives in the world to fund their development. AMD, Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, ARM Holdings, and basically everyone else who designs and sells CPUs or GPUs, or uses either compiler extensively enough, contributes to LLVM and/or GCC for the purely selfish reason of making sure the code that is generated makes their platform or software product look good. The efficiency is very high, because nobody has to sell or market the compiler itself, because the compiler is a tool to ensure the marketability of their hardware products. When AMD wants to sell GPUs to the deep learning community, they base their work on LLVM because it is cheaper for them. They put it in the open because it makes it easier to consider using ROCm in your deep learning or image processing workload; because on the long tail of rare bugs, it is more likely that the customer will fix the compiler than the vendor, even if the vendor is being paid. I don't like the tone or tenor of the responses to me in this thread at all, you folks are making it out like a) I personally don't pay anyone for compilers, or b) I don't think it costs money to develop software. In reality, I just recognize that the recurring licensing cost of MSVC encourages people to use old compilers with lower feature sets, which in turn encourages open source projects to accommodate those lower feature sets way past their due. With the free compilers, yes the majority of people are freeloaders, but you can at least be expected to have the most recent version (and obviously there was enough money in it to make that happen!). MSVC is not a better compiler, by basically any metric except Windows integration, than either GCC or LLVM. LLVM and GCC are built entirely on the selfish interests of the union of its users. They are free to freeloaders, valuable to exploit, and always fresh. What exactly is not to like here? If you spend all your time belittling and making light of people, you'll never hear what they have to say for what it is.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    I prefer a world where proprietary software consits of 90% FOSS or OSS and 10% proprietary over a world where proprietary software is 100% proprietary. The problem with funding open source projects is that monetization can kill the community. You either have a dual license scheme or a support contract scheme where a few guys make money and the rest doesn't.
- bbernoulli 9y ago
  I can't speak for other companies, but when I used express, I was in what was really a non developer role and used VS express to write some internal tools. That and other software I wrote allowed me to move into a developer role and we have since happily purchased pro licenses. I probably would have used an alternative to C#/WPF if express hadn't been available at the time. We have less than 5 devs but failed one of the criteria listed here: https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/ https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/

pjmlp 9y ago

The only license restrictions on community are for companies with more than 5 developers. Any larger company can surely afford professional licenses. When I started on IT we had to buy everything, just like on other professions.

cwyers 9y ago
I love contrasting threads like this with the outraged threads over "why aren't companies contributing to open source products that they use?" It makes it very, very clear that there is a large segment of the free software community that is only here for the "free as in beer" part, which is why it's so hard to get funding for a lot of important open source projects.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Yes, I fully agree with you.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  If you "love these threads" so much, you might just be chronically misunderstanding people. The problem is that no matter how far MSVC goes, those with old licenses for one reason or another tend to bring down the lowest common denominator. I would have no qualms buying a VS Professional/Enterprise license and upgrading it if I were in that position, but I can not very well stand on my pulpit demanding that everyone else do so. The great thing about the free compilers is that there are enough disparate incentives in the world to fund their development. AMD, Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, ARM Holdings, and basically everyone else who designs and sells CPUs or GPUs, or uses either compiler extensively enough, contributes to LLVM and/or GCC for the purely selfish reason of making sure the code that is generated makes their platform or software product look good. The efficiency is very high, because nobody has to sell or market the compiler itself, because the compiler is a tool to ensure the marketability of their hardware products. When AMD wants to sell GPUs to the deep learning community, they base their work on LLVM because it is cheaper for them. They put it in the open because it makes it easier to consider using ROCm in your deep learning or image processing workload; because on the long tail of rare bugs, it is more likely that the customer will fix the compiler than the vendor, even if the vendor is being paid. I don't like the tone or tenor of the responses to me in this thread at all, you folks are making it out like a) I personally don't pay anyone for compilers, or b) I don't think it costs money to develop software. In reality, I just recognize that the recurring licensing cost of MSVC encourages people to use old compilers with lower feature sets, which in turn encourages open source projects to accommodate those lower feature sets way past their due. With the free compilers, yes the majority of people are freeloaders, but you can at least be expected to have the most recent version (and obviously there was enough money in it to make that happen!). MSVC is not a better compiler, by basically any metric except Windows integration, than either GCC or LLVM. LLVM and GCC are built entirely on the selfish interests of the union of its users. They are free to freeloaders, valuable to exploit, and always fresh. What exactly is not to like here? If you spend all your time belittling and making light of people, you'll never hear what they have to say for what it is.
- imtringued 9y ago
  I prefer a world where proprietary software consits of 90% FOSS or OSS and 10% proprietary over a world where proprietary software is 100% proprietary. The problem with funding open source projects is that monetization can kill the community. You either have a dual license scheme or a support contract scheme where a few guys make money and the rest doesn't.
bbernoulli 9y ago
I can't speak for other companies, but when I used express, I was in what was really a non developer role and used VS express to write some internal tools. That and other software I wrote allowed me to move into a developer role and we have since happily purchased pro licenses. I probably would have used an alternative to C#/WPF if express hadn't been available at the time. We have less than 5 devs but failed one of the criteria listed here: https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/ https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/