Microsoft has announced slimmed-down "Express" editions
of its Visual Studio developer tool for specific programming
languages.
In addition, the software maker announced Visual Web Developer
2005 Express Edition, the logical successor to its current ASP
(Active Server Pages) .net Web Matrix offering for beginning web
developers.Microsoft also changed the name of its Microsoft SQL
Server Desktop Engine (MSDE), the little brother of its SQL Server
database, to SQL Server Express Edition.
Microsoft hopes the new members of its Visual Studio product
family will appeal to what it estimates are 18 million
nonprofessional developers worldwide. The full Visual Studio
product is targeted at the 6 million professional coders around the
world, said John Montgomery, director of marketing for Microsoft's
developer group.
"One of the pieces of feedback we received from the
nonprofessional segment is that our professional tools are too big
and too complicated," he said. "They told us they want something
that was very small and focused on just the thing they are going to
do."
The Express Editions will be available for the Visual Basic,
Visual J#, Visual C# and Visual C++ programming languages and will
cost less than $100.
To help developers get started, Montgomery said that Amazon,
eBay and PayPal will provide kits that include sample code to make
it easy to create Web or Windows applications that work with their
online services.
Offering low-end developer products is a common practice in the
industry and an important part of a vendor's strategy to win
developers for its platform, .net in Microsoft's case, said Thomas
Murphy, a vice president of research services at Meta Group.
"For both the Java side of the camp and the .net side there is a
battle of who can have the largest market share and building market
share starts with developers," he said.
Microsoft not only seeks backing for .net, it is also promoting
its SQL Server database. Developers who need a lightweight database
for their application can use the vendor's new SQL Server Express.
The software is available free of charge and includes much of the
same functionality found in SQL Server 2005, but is limited in size
to 4G bytes and can only run on a single processor.
Test versions of the new Express products are scheduled to be
available online by the end of the week. The products are
officially named Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition, Visual C# 2005
Express Edition, Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and Visual J# 2005
Express Edition.
Final versions of all the Express products are due out with the
final release of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, expected
in the first half of next year.
Joris Evers writes for IDG News
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