Free and Cool - Visual Studio and Programming Robots...

Here's two announcements which in their own right are pretty cool, but add them together...

It's just been announced that Visual Studio Express will be free indefinitely ! - this is awesome news for hobbyists, students etc...

So, now that you have your Visual Studio Express tools installed and working what exactly are you going to do with it ? - perhaps write an application to track your stamp collection, or favorite recipies (great ideas, but I'm sure you would agree that these are pretty boring, right?).

How about building your own Lego Mindstorms robot and then programming this through Visual Studio ! - Now that sounds more like it... Check out the Coding4Fun site to get more information.

- Mike

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2006
  Sounds awesome, but for CE&WM developers don't...
  
  Mike, do you know if Microsoft is planning some "free devices-only-development" Visual Studio Editions like eVC 4.0 was?
  
  Thanks.
• Anonymous
  April 20, 2006
  how did I know that was going to come up as a question ;O)
  
  I would suggest this question gets posted over to the .NET Compact Framework team http://blogs.msdn.com/netcfteam/ or the Visual Studio for Devices team blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/vsdteam/
  
  If you get an answer please drop a comment here...
  
  - Mike
  
  
• Anonymous
  April 20, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  April 20, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  April 20, 2006
  as a student, this is awesome ... i'd like to see universities finally teach some useful languages ! Our school is everything Java... but not too hard to switch over to .NET after though.
• Anonymous
  April 24, 2006
  I jsut want to say that as a long time fan of VS.NET and an owner of VS Pro 2005, I think this is fantastic.
  
  Thanks guys - this means a lot of people can get into .NET programming for free and learn enough to hopefully see how much fun it is.
  
  Adding a Visual Devices Express would be excellent - but don't think we're not grateful for this. :)