[Swifty]

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/19/157208

The SCP code base is a nightmare to navigate without a decent IDE (I swear by Bookmarks, Go To Definition, and Find All References). And I imagine a good debugger is also useful but I've yet to get used to using one myself. Visual Studio is probably among the best out there and Microsoft is now giving away their professional editions for free to eligible students. Anybody interested in committing or tinkering with the SCP in Windows should check this out.

[Dark RevenantX]

Aw, ****...  I'm a high school student.

[blackhole]

WHY must I be a high school student 

[WMCoolmon]

Interesting. Although I also have a pretty good impression of the VS Express products. VC++ Express 2008 seems leaner than Visual C++ Standard 2003, which makes it tempting to try. Unfortunately, it also requires Windows XP.

[MP-Ryan]

Hrmmm... my student status doesn't expire until April... *is tempted*

EDIT:  CURSES!  Well, for you Canadians, the only school listed in Canada isn't.  ISIC is the only available option.

[phatosealpha]

How exactly is this different from the MSDN AA?  Really, if my rinky dink community college was a member, chances are any decent uni is going to be, it's generally open to any CS majors at colleges who are members (and it ain't like VS is all that much use to an english major anyway), and they just toss software at you.

[Grace_ofGod]

Actually, you don't have to be a CS major (or even anything related) to get the software.  You must be enrolled in a university though.  Supposedly, Microsoft is planning to give to software away to even high school students pretty soon.

If your school isn't listed (I go to U. of Minnesota, and it wasn't) you can also verify through the JourneyEd link.  It takes like a day to get a download code. 

[Solatar]

Well, they probably realize that most highschool students who have these high end programs steal them anyway. If they can get them interested in them at the highschool and college level, they'll be more likely to buy them when they have the money simply because they already can work them. For instance, I used a pirated version of Finale for awhile, but when I got older I had a job and could afford the student priced version of it (not a MS product, but the same situation really).

[achtung]

Actually, I'd take it one step further and say it's there to get students used to Microsoft's various proprietary languages/software/resources.  This way it sort of locks these people into developing for MS-only OS' and environments.

It's a trap!

[Solatar]

I'd say you're right. Of course this isn't just out of the goodness of their hearts.

...I'll take the free **** though...it's free afterall...

[draeath]

You don't want any of MS's dev tools. One, it's a trap. Two, its heavy. Three, cross-platform is needlessly hard with it.

[WMCoolmon]

You just might. There are no alternatives with all the critical features of Microsoft's dev tools, much less good ones. The open source community has been trying to put together an IDE that is the equal of MSVC++ for awhile, but if anybody's succeeded, it's only been in the last year or two.

The closest I've seen so far is Eclipse, and even it is lacking a compiler or a debugger for C++ (I forget which).

[Polpolion]

Well, they probably realize that most highschool students who have these high end programs steal them anyway. If they can get them interested in them at the highschool and college level, they'll be more likely to buy them when they have the money simply because they already can work them. For instance, I used a pirated version of Finale for awhile, but when I got older I had a job and could afford the student priced version of it (not a MS product, but the same situation really).

They probably also realize that most high school students that would know how to use this, or even care in the remotest sense, will probably be going into the general CS area eventually.

[Grace_ofGod]

You just might. There are no alternatives with all the critical features of Microsoft's dev tools, much less good ones. The open source community has been trying to put together an IDE that is the equal of MSVC++ for awhile, but if anybody's succeeded, it's only been in the last year or two.

The closest I've seen so far is Eclipse, and even it is lacking a compiler or a debugger for C++ (I forget which).

Eclipse is currently lacking both a compiler and a debugger for C++.  You have to download/install miniGW or cygwin.  Same for Netbeans C++ package.

It is unfortunate that MSVC++ is not cross platform.  But you can always program in a way that uses libraries that are shared among many platforms, making code a bit more portable.

[draeath]

Most decent programmers outside of the Windows world generally don't need IDEs. I can see how they might be useful, but generally a good editor with hilighting and general programming support are all you need. If you haven't, I would suggest looking at vim or emacs. Weird to learn but damn-good. Kate also works very well, if you use KDE, and I think gedit (gnome) can be configured for it as well. jEdit is good all-around, as it uses Java it doesn't care what desktop you use.

In short, MSVC++ is unnecessary bloat. Eclipse for that matter would be as well.

[WMCoolmon]

At a certain point, I got sick and tired of all the time I was wasting to start three different programs and configure kdbg just to work on code. Why do I need to switch over to the console window and type "make && make install" when I could just hit ctrl-shift-b? Why spend the extra minute or two to start kdbg and configure it - and restart and reconfigure it when the program crashed in a certain way - when I didn't even have to do anything to get that functionality in MSVC++? And let's not go into all the handwaving that seemed to be behind dealing with the code itself. Sure, I could've found the kdbg manual and understood it...but at a certain point, that just seemed rather retarded when I could just switch back to MSVC++ and get all that functionality without having to work on it.

A lot of Linux people just don't seem to get this, but sometimes programs and computers are just tools. How many hours of people's lives are being wasted because they're trying to get three separate programs to work in concert rather than just starting up one? Sure, if that's your cup of tea - if that's how you want to spend your time - then go for it. But, I, personally, don't find much value in learning about how one programmer thinks that programs should be when there's such a paucity of choices available that there's no way of judging whether or not there's any value in that method.

And regardless of learning about the program, unless I'm actually working on a compiler or a debugger, all that information is distracting and irrelevant. If I've got a certain set of features all mapped out, there's no way in hell that I want to spend my time messing with something completely different in order to let me debug it. I'll take the extra bloat, very happily, if it'll let me focus on what I'm doing and let me do it with a minimum of fuss.

So IMHO it's not just that everyone who disagrees with you sucks.

[Scuddie]

Preach it, WMC!  Preach it!!

[castor]

On the other hand, change is the only static thing here too. Highly integrated IDEs are nice, but the more used one gets to one, the more painful it will be to switch WHEN the day comes
I guess keeping one foot in each world would be optimal.