So you want to play with writing code for Windows?

Maybe I've been living in a hole for the past six months, but I just found an announcement on the Microsoft Developer Network site: the Visual Studio Express Editions are free - forever!

 That's great news if you are looking for a low-cost development environment for Windows. For many of us, the Express Editions are probably all we need. The only major drawback is the lack of a full MSDN Library. Had I known this before I probably would have gotten these instead of a Visual Studio Standard Edition license.

Published Tue, Sep 19 2006 10:55 AM by jesper
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Comments

# Bill Hayes said on 19 September, 2006 04:18 PM
Looks like MS has been offering this since April 2006. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/apr06/04-19VSExpressFreePR.mspx.
# jesper said on 19 September, 2006 04:51 PM

Yep. Like I said, I may have been living in a hole for the past six months. :-)

Still, it is pretty cool that most of the IDE is available for free. Of course, there are command line compilers in the SDK, but it is kind of painful to use those for anything really interesting unless you have a big process around it.

# Dave said on 19 September, 2006 04:52 PM
The full MSDN Library is now available for free download as well: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=373930CB-A3D7-4EA5-B421-DD6818DC7C41&displaylang=en The version posted is the May 2006 edition, but my understanding is that they would make available updated versions, but not sure what schedule...
# Steve Boiler said on 26 December, 2008 03:43 PM

I am an IT major in college with my Associates program in Network Admin, and soon to start my BA in Netowrk Security, my dream job is to be with the FBI for computer crimes, maybe some kind of Anti-Hacker type position, but I am EXTREMELY green in the thumbs from an IT standpoint. Any ideas that could help point me in the right direction, and any other areas I should look into to acieve this.

# Jane said on 07 January, 2009 06:51 PM

I have a BS in CS&MIS from the mid 80's.  The last code I wrote was in Natural before that IBM Control Language, COBOLII and Fortran.  Life happens, careers diverge, you start and stay home for 6-8 years with 4 kids.  Now I'm on the 3rd day of trying to clean my PC of a virus and wishing I'd kept up my skills a bit better.  Is there a place I can start to re-educate myself and maybe transfer all that education and prior career skills to the newer technologies? Thanks!  jane@harnagy.com