The price of Visual Studio Ultimate

I paid $7,000 for a 80486, 50MHz computer around the year 1990 (adjusted for inflation)

and $4,700 in todays dollars for a laptop, 300MHz

I bought a used Porsche for $24,000, in todays dollars (and I still have it, stored in my garage).

I don't do enough programming yet to justify Ultimate. I hope to change that soon though.

Don't worry, it will be in the Metro App store soon. Wait a few more weeks and it will be down to 79p

@Dr Herbie:

Sorry it costs so much for you. For all the complaints against Apple, their development tools subscriptions are actually dirt cheap compared to Microsoft.

@1001011:

Cheaper then the Express versions?

So they will give me money?

Where do I sign up!

6 hours ago, TexasToast wrote

If you think that is expensive you must have never used Vxworks.  Try 10k $ a year and yes when it expires you cannot compile anymore.   Microsoft has always been cheap.   If you cannot afford Ultimate try a cheaper version.   Microsoft has never priced themselves out of a market.

Until now, your head is buried in the sand, and some of us that are old enough to see companies fail are starting to make a lot of noise.

Take WPF for example, people are now saying that it did not take off. for the last 5 years people have complained saying it was slow. Microsoft have now fixed a fundamental issue in .NET 4.5 that should have been fixed in .NET 3.0.

Microsoft only have themselves to blame if the market does not lap up their products. Developers in general are excitable and adopt tech as soon as is available.

[edit]

When win 8 CP came out it had a million download in less than a week. If adoption is low, Microsoft have themselves to blame.

4 hours ago, vesuvius wrote

Microsoft only have themselves to blame if the market does not lap up their products.

VS Ultimate might have low adoption, but VS doesn't in general.

When win 8 came out it had a million download in less than a week. 

I'm pretty sure Win8 hasn't come out yet. And if it has, nobody told Microsoft :/

55 minutes ago, evildictaitor wrote

*snip*

VS Ultimate might have low adoption, but VS doesn't in general.

*snip*

I'm pretty sure Win8 hasn't come out yet. And if it has, nobody told Microsoft :/

I am talking about everything in General. If you call yourself a comedian, put a show on, and people boo, 9 times out of 10 your jokes are not very good.

If adoption of WPF, Windows Phone or Windows 8 is low, then they are to blame, either for creating products that consumers dislike, or because they are too late to market. it is the "je ne sais quoi" that is missing for the Phone, but Metro would have taken off immediately if it was not locked down (profit wise) and Microsoft had been dangling carrots to developers throughout the whole process.

The profit margins are approaching slim to none for most app developers on windows, and if something does not make money it fails, which is where Metro is heading.

7 minutes ago, vesuvius wrote

*snip*

I am talking about everything in General. If you call yourself a comedian, put a show on, and people boo, 9 times out of 10 your jokes are not very good.

If adoption of WPF, Windows Phone or Windows 8 is low, then they are to blame, either for creating products that consumers dislike, or because they are too late to market. it is the "je ne sais quoi" that is missing for the Phone, but Metro would have taken off immediately if it was not locked down (profit wise) and Microsoft had been dangling carrots to developers throughout the whole process.

The profit margins are approaching slim to none for most app developers on windows, and if something does not make money it fails, which is where Metro is heading.

 

So true. Take their Lightswitch product. That looked like the think that would have finally boosted SL's uptake in a lot of companies that needed basic CRUD screen LOB apps for cheap. As they release it they effectively kill WPF/SL for WinRT/Metro with a nice lock-in to W8 and the market. Sure you can still use Lightswitch but who wants to be the guy who recommends a business use it only to find out later that there is no further development of that product. You're stuck with a 1.0 product with no hope for fixes and improvements. They could have pushed Lightswitch, included metro templates and all, created a metro-like framework for SL and pushed it like crazy. Instead they shoot it in the head and move on to "Walls without Windows". Brilliant!

22 minutes ago, vesuvius wrote

If adoption of ... Windows 8 is low.... but Metro would have taken off immediately if  ...it fails, which is where Metro is heading.

It's a bit harsh to hammer Windows 8 and Metro before they even start selling it.

Also Apple doesn't seem to have any problem finding people to write apps for the iPhone or iPad - so this suggestion that the Windows8 appstore is a business-model too far for app-developers or that it is doomed to failure seems transparently wrong.

@Maddus Mattus:

express is not a developer subscription. the full version of xcode is free with the purchase of a mac. it's on the extras dvd.

12 minutes ago, evildictaitor wrote

*snip*

It's a bit harsh to hammer Windows 8 and Metro before they even start selling it.

Also Apple doesn't seem to have any problem finding people to write apps for the iPhone or iPad - so this suggestion that the Windows8 appstore is a business-model too far for app-developers or that it is doomed to failure seems transparently wrong.

A sign of my frustration, but we will have to wait. Right now there are loads of WPF developers, even winforms developers have dabbled in .xaml. If you also include the web/silverlight developers then that is quite some number. Microsoft say that "the world of people developing apps has ballooned from a few million developers to nearly 100 million" so they needed to cater for HTML5/Javascript programmers.

They have done this (sacrificing the professionals for the hobbyists), but blocked pretty much all of their existing developers. I have written 4 commercial apps that have all shipped in WPF in the Visual Studio 2010 time-frame. 3 of the 4 are definite candidates for Metro, but this will never happen as things currently are.

Taking a Web/Silverlight developer used to controlling his server and giving him Metro/WinRT is an exercise in futility on Microsoft's part.

I am resigned to the fact that software changes never happen overnight, so there will be a few years until decisions need to be taken, we'll have to wait and see.

Yea I think the mistake MS made was to introduce WPF in the first place. Instead they should have evolved WinForms into what we needed (including adding XAML support). WPF is bloated, overengineered and slow. No wonder it hasn't taken off.

WPF only failed to pick up steam because it was perceived as a way to do fancy graphics instead of a solid LOB app UI framework. The databinding/templating in it is incredibly flexible. But Microsoft pushed the fancy animations and 3D support instead, so most developers never even tried it.

@spivonious: +1

I felt they were trying to woo the web developers and designers, but in stead they ended up losing the LOB developers.

Herbie

I tried WPF but the performance was so bad I gave up. I had a rant about it somewhere in this forum wondering how my computer was able to run Crysis quite well but was brought to its knees when trying to display a simple WPF UI with a few dozen drop shadows.

@BitFlipper: Yeah we had to get rid of the drop shadows and put in some crazy workaround for UIAutomation to work around a known Microsoft bug that they failed to fix. I really wish they would have spent time fixing WPF/SL and evolving it to WinRT/Metro much like your case for making WinForms the starting point for the evolution.

@DeathByVisualStudio: LightSwitch v2 is included in Visual Studio 11 Beta with several innovations already, including OData support, and more due by RTM. Hardly a case of killing a v1.0 product before it has taken off.

However, Microsoft did themsleves no favours at all by saying Silverlight 5 would be the last version without saying AT THE SAME TIME what would replace it and what the migration path would be.

@SimonJ: I was worried about that, since we have a couple of LightSwitch apps that we deployed. However, I'm going to guess that it's only a matter of time before LightSwitch can generate an MVC application in addition to Silverlight.