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(* Anything surrounded with stars has, thanks to my better judgement before hitting post, been edited with more pleasant phrases so as not to offend.  Please use your imagination to infer the original intention)

Since I've started working from home I've been temporarily using Visual Studio Express since its free and everything but not having access to Visual Assist or the macro recorder is driving me absolutely batty  :wtf:.  So now I've decided its time to take the plunge and purchase a better copy of Visual Studio, but when I browsed to the Microsoft site to take a look I was *rather dumb struck*. The pricing of Visual Studio 2010 (the only one you can purchase there now go figure) is *a tad silly in its magnitude*.  There's just no way I can justify *depositing with gratuitous vigour* 700 pound sterling up microsoft's *well endowed bank account* just to get two measly additional features I'm interested in.  And why *on earth* do I have to buy the whole *rather bloated* studio when I'm not going to use 90% of it, just let me buy the standard c++ part you *money craving illicit night workers with a penchant for gargling bitter fluids*  >:(.

Anyway rant over :facepalm:. Fortunately I've found out I can still get my hands on some old copies of visual studio 2008 for a much more reasonable price if I look around, and since, as far as I know, there's been no must have improvements made as far as I'm concerned that's all good.

I did find something bizarre though when looking through micrsofts website.  The upgrade version of visual studio 2010 can be bought a couple hundred pounds cheaper than the full edition.  However if you scroll down and click on the 'before you buy' link, in there it says:


Why charge 700 pounds for the full edition when you could register yourself 'for free' as an express edition user and then upgrade for 200 pounds less?  What's the catch here?  I just dont get it, it all seems a bit retarded.  Is that just a trap to get people who dont read all the details and subsections properly to pay more?  Has anyone tried this?

Thanks, I'm Literally A Baby And The Last Place I Expect To See Bad Words Is On The Internet.

If you can get your hands on a .edu email address, it's free.
 (https://www.dreamspark.com/) Some schools also let you grab it for free through MSDNAA. Also, isn't visual assist another $250? You're gonna have to shell out ~$1k to get everything.

It costs that much because they're marketing this at studios / professionals, pretty much the same reason 3ds max / maya / photoshop are so expensive.

If you don't have a .edu email address... I dunno. I've never really needed a macro recorder when actually programming, so I usually just use notepad++ for that sort of thing. I guess you'd be out of luck as far as visual assist goes, though.

finally: *watches as a million nerds descend on the thread, commenting on how VS is inferior to X*

unfortunately the edu edition (which you get from dreamspark) restricts you to not using it for commercial purposes.  Dont think I'd want to take that chance and get myself into a legal nightmare, its just not worth it.  Visual Assist is $99 for an individual license, worth every penny in my opinion, I've been using it for years and I'm just way too slow and lost without it now.  The macro recorder isn't a big deal, I can get around that using non add-ins, but I cant use Visual Assist with an express edition.  I guess that's whats made me angry, that they expect 700 pounds from me just so I can use add-in software someone else has built, plus the fact that they make me buy a boat load of stuff I dont want with that which is whats inflating the price.

I'm really interested to know though if anyone has bought visual studio pro through the upgrade option from the express edition.  If the pricing works like it looks like it does it seems really greedy of microsoft to try and get people to pay 700 pounds for the full edition if they only value it themselves at 200 pounds cheaper since they give you the option to buy it for that price if you jump through hoops to get it.

It's for price discrimination ... a "professional" product like this is worth a lot to some of the people who use it professionally, but very little to people just starting out.  They want to charge people what they are willing to pay, while still getting even those who won't pay anything to start using their product (as they might turn out to being paying customers later, especially the students).  So there are many different 'tiers' of visual studio pricing, based on features (express, pro, team, or ultimate versions), whether you're a student/academic, and how much legwork you're willing to do to find a deal.

They don't "value" the software at a fixed price at all; it's all a sunk development cost anyway, and distribution is almost free.

I'm all for sensible price discrimination, I think its good that software companies offer free cutdown versions for people to try out and train on, and I'm willing to part with cash to support those products when I want pro features.  Unfortunately here though I dont feel Microsoft have been particularly fair with how they bundle visual studio and distribute its features across its various editions.  They've cut out various crucial productivity features from the free edition which are important to individual users but then made the first pay tier one who's price is greatly inflated by including lots of other un-needed additional products and features which are only really useful to larger businesses who either have wider needs or who can easily soak up the cost of purchasing the extra un-necessary software.  In the past Microsoft used to split visual studio into its components and let you purchase them individualy so you could customise your spendings to your needs, plus they used to include add-in support in the express addition anyway.  To then remove certain key features and force you to purchase so much extra unwanted guff at extra cost to get them back is what makes this different.  They've created what I feel is a large rift between catering for the hobby coder and larger business which wasn't there before and is unfortunately where people like me find themselves having already become accustomed to their software.

Can you use older versions of their software, if the old free version supported what you wanted?  Just an idea -- I'm not very familiar with the changes in recent versions (I've stuck with 2008 just because the text is blurry in vs2010 on my machine) ...

*what the fuck* is up with these *fucking tidbits*

Unfortunately not, they removed those features from the downloads of older express versions when they made the change, at least when they still supported the older versions anyway.  Now they just dont offer those downloads anymore at all.  I had a look around on the nets to see if I could find a stored copy of the older express versions before they removed these features but no luck.  I've found some cheaper copies of the 2008 pro visual studio sill knocking around though so I'll probably buy one of those.


 :lol:

Is there an uncensored version of this rant?

Their BizSpark program (of which I'm a member of) let's you apply to get full access to MSDN (meaning all full versions of VS among other things), and other programs if accepted for 3 years.  At the end, you pay $100.  Check it out at http://www.bizspark.com/Pages/home.aspx and see if it works for you?

I don't understand.

You say you're "working from home". If you mean you're working from home as an employee of a company, they should cover the cost of Visual Studio - in fact, if they've paid for you to have a copy of it at work, that license should automatically cover a second copy at home, since you can only physically be using one copy at any given time. If you mean that you are a freelancer, or in some other way self-employed, just pay the money. £700 is a pretty negligible expense in business terms.

If you're an indie, or a hobbyist, you've got two choices: Use the freebie version (Visual C++ Express, is it?) and live without Visual Assist and pay for the upgrade when your product is finished, about to launch and you're confident you'll be making money back, or use one of the different, free IDEs. Seriously, last time I checked, Microsoft's freebie Visual C++ thing was pretty fully featured (barring the ability to add Visual Assist to it - hey, I love it too, but you can't have everything).

The censoring of your *undelightful and sarcastic* comments was actually *remarkably* entertaining.

@DeadPixel:  Cheers for the link, that's really interesting and something I wasn't aware off.  Its good to see that they're taking some measures to accomodate smaller start-ups since their new pricing structure has done a pretty good job of shutting them out otherwise.  I'll be looking into this, cheers
  :beer:.

@LemonScented: Yeh I'm a start-up indie.  I used to work for some of the larger game companies but things aren't going well in the UK for game studios with many being shutdown or downsizing and in particular in my area of the country there's very few opportunities left so I've decided to try going solo.  I did consider what you've suggested, the express editions are still excellent pieces of software but unfortunately microsoft decided to cut out significant productivity features which I've since become accustomed too.  Its kind of left me in a catch 22 where either I have to give in to microsofts extortion and effectly burn a large sum of money on unwanted products just because the one product I do want can only be bought in that bundle for an inflated price, or I effectively take the hit over the course of my project in lost productivity and hence increased development time which will probably cost me the same or more if I intend to pay myself anything livable on.  I'm still considering now whether I'm better off paying less for the older 2008 version for which there's still some copies floating around at various retailers, I'm just worried that microsoft have stopped (or will soon stop) supporting this version so if I get stuck I'm probably screwed.