Say Hi to Visual Basic Express
This blog enty’s a little late because I’ve been running around like mad at TechEd Europe, but I just wanted to add to the chorus of good news around the launch of the Visual Studio Express line. We launched Express with a demo of VB Express during the keynote on Monday. Andy Sterland, a computer science undergrad from the University of Hull, showed the crowd the My Movie collection starter kit.
As you’ve probably heard, the Express line is targeted at hobbyists, enthusiasts and other non-professional developers. I got my start as a developer programming in BASIC when my father’s company sent him home with an IBM PC when I was in 5th grade – when you booted the machine with no disk in the drive, it ended up in BASIC, so I just started programming. Trust me, getting BASICA was a big deal. ;-) I’m really excited that we now have more easy ways for developers to learn to program.
We’re going to have Starter Kits that come with each of the products that provide a fully-functional program. VB already has a DVD Collection tracking Starter Kit that we’re shipping with the Beta. It’s pretty cool because it downloads movie information from Amazon.com and stores some of that info in a local database. So here’s a question – what other starter kits do you want to see? What other things would make you interested in kicking the tires and getting going with programming? And if you’re a pro dev reading my blog, what things do you think beginning programmers should see?
There’s been a little confusion around the fact that we’re not giving out a “go-live” license with this release of the beta – This means that we don’t think the product is ready to run in a production environment (it’s a beta, folks). Once we release the Express line, you’ll be able to distribute any programs that you develop with it just like you can with the Standard, Pro, and Enterprise lines.
So what do you think? Like the Beta? Let us know.
Comments
- Anonymous
June 30, 2004
Installed just the VB.Net 2005 Express Beta and related bits last night.
Maybe this is a stress test, but I used a PIII 533EB XP Pro system with 256MB RAM. The install process was tortuously slow (2 hours?) with 2 reboots. The final product is slow and clunky as molasses in January.
Yes, I realize it's a beta and the final release may be tweaked up a bit. Still... wow. I suspect even twice the CPU clock and RAM would still be pokey. What is the realistic target hardware spec for these products? I know many students still using laptops with specs close to this desktop I used - or just slightly better. - Anonymous
July 01, 2004
Bob - that's a pretty unusual experience. We're targeting a much faster install time than that - on the order of 15 minutes for everything - certainly not two hours. I'll foward this along to the setup team. did you have a highspeed internet connection? - Anonymous
July 04, 2004
One of the major things I noticed when I first tried it out was that the compiler was VERY FAST!!! I think it's just what I want. Well everything except one thing... I can't write apps for pda's :'( Other than that this is gonna be the best VB ever :D
P.s. hehe I'm 13 and I've been developing in vb since i was nine. Because my Dad VB 3, 4 & 6 just sitting there. He never learnt VB so I just bought a vb6 book and started coding away! Now I have Visual Studio.NET 2003. Although I have C#, C++ and J# now I still prefer VB! - Anonymous
July 08, 2004
Have you heard of anyone (besides myself) that cannot download the VB2005Express beta? I am chomping at the bit to give it a try but the progress bar never moves for me... 0 KB / 176476 KB forver.... BITS is started .... the only issue I can think of is my university's firewall maybe?? I did download the .Net framework and SQL Express separately.
Any advice? - Anonymous
August 02, 2004
Tim- me too, i can't seem to download it. do you know of any other reason? - Anonymous
June 18, 2009
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