New Free C++ Tools From Microsoft

[fatcatfan]

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/visualc/default.aspx


The Express products are designed for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students. As such, they lack the full breadth of features found in Visual Studio and are designed specifically for scenarios common to the hobbyist, enthusiast, and student. Each Express product includes targeted documentation that will help the beginning programmer quickly learn the concepts required to build more advanced applications. The user interfaces are significantly streamlined to ensure that extraneous features do not interfere with the learning process. The fundamental idea is that the Express products will guide the novice or beginner carefully so they are successful and gain confidence early in their programming "career."

Actually, I think these express tools and their betas are for several of the MS development products, not just C++

[AtmaWeapon]

I've played around with VB .NET 2005 Express and it's dead sexy. It's very close to C# these days, and I didn't test a couple of the things that I wanted them to add so I'm not sure.

Visual Studio .NET 2005 is probably the only piece of software that isn't a game that I'm looking forward to this year :).

[Ich]

I'll have to wait for them to release RPM's.

[fatcatfan]

I'll have to wait for them to release RPM's.

:p I'm all for cross-platform development, and the simple fact is that MS's native compiler is far more efficient than GCC and company for creating Windows executables. I can compile wxWidgets with VC++ in a few minutes, with GCC in Cygwin or MinGW it takes more like an hour.