Visual Studio Express Should be Part of Windows
Jeroen van den Bos has made the case for adding VS Express to Windows. [1]
Dan Fernandez responds by saying [2]:
- Legal: No really, this was an issue. I'm not going into details, but this is a "deal-breaker" if you will.
- Setup: Dropping bits on a CD is an easy task, but creating a way to service those bits (and every piece of the Windows OS is serviceable) is not straightforward. Without getting into the weeds of why this is, the short answer is that Windows have a wholly different setup (and therefore servicing model) than Visual Studio does. Servicing would basically be *way* too much work for the benefit. If, however, the setup/installer technologies were unified, this would be much easier.
- Vista Bar: To ensure quality, Vista has a number of criteria that need to be met and meeting this bar could add a huge amount of work that the dev team didn't have schedule for.
- Localization: A minor one to consider, but Visual Studio Express is only localized in 9 languages while Windows is in some 80+ languages or dialects. Our default answer here is to provide the English language when no localized version is available so this isn't a showstopper
- Versions: There are five different versions of Visual Studio Express. Do we include all? Who's our customer? Which version are they most likely to use? Do we include Web tools? Which version of Vista does it make sense to integrate in (we only went for Ultimate).
Developer tools is where open source operating systems like Linux beat Microsoft hands down. If you look at these reasons, the only one that really has any validity is the legal issues, since everyone likes to sue the pants off of MS. The other ones are just cop outs. You could place an icon to the installer on the desktop / start menu (like AOL, etc. have been doing for years) and not have to deal with setup concerns, so that really isn't a good reason it can't ship with the OS. As far as the "Vista Bar" and Localization are concerned it's rediculous to suggest that nothing is better than something. So what if it isn't localized into 80 languages. First off, that isn't that hard to do. Secondly, anyone doing development is going to have to know english fairly well anyway to deal with all the names in the class libraries. The versioning issue is just as much of a cop out. Sounds like one of those reasons people come up with not to do something just because they don't want to do it and they need a list to justify not doing it.
[1] http://jvdb.org/blog/2006/06/23/why-visual-studio-should-be-part-of-windows/
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2006/08/10/694832.aspx