This is old news by now (announced April 19), but I just think that it's so cool that the Express editions of Visual Studio will be free forever now! Honestly, I would have been pretty surprised if they hadn't made that announcement. Not that I had any inside knowledge on the subject, but it made so much sense. In terms of competing with Java, there needed to be a good powerful free product out there. Visual Studio has always been the IDE gold standard to me. I programmed in Java for years, but I also dabbled in VB at the time due to corporate needs. Even in VB 6 I thought MS ran circles around every Java IDE vendor.

As an aside, I should say that I think that Eclipse is excellent. It's the closest contender out there, but it needs plugins to be useful. As a shell it's awesome. I even wrote some plugins for it at the time, demonstrating its niche as a general app container!

With Visual Studio Express free now, so many more hobbyists will be able to get in the game. When I think about how I got started with computers, it was such a different world! I would bring home a Atari 800 computer from school each week. Later I bought my own Atari 1200XL (5th grade), then Atari 130XE, then moved onto the Commodore 64 (10th grade), then Amiga 1000 (12th grade), then Amiga 2000. When I started work at MCI years ago, needless to say, they were standardized on the PC architecture forcing me to (eventually) upgrade at home! They were actually running OS/2 at the time, but within a few years moved to NT 4.0. (Whew! Too much history about me?).

My point is, on every machine I owned, programming was entering text on the screen. Atari and Commodore computers used BASIC by default, so that's what I used. When I moved up to the Amiga, I learned C and Assembler, but it was all text editors and command line compiling (and was it ever slow!). If I had had access to an IDE like Visual Studio at those earlier stages of my life, I can't imagine how much further I may have been able to get. The internet in general has made such an impact. I used to type source code out of magazines. That was my community at that point! No users' groups (rural areas), no local phone call BBS's. I was really on my own. Ocassionally I'd find a used book about programming at a sale in "the city" and I would be in Heaven! The right tools can be the difference between someone that wants to learn how to program, and someone who is learning.

I hope that many people take advantage of this offer. The amount of sample code available today is truly staggering, and newsgroup and forum support can be very helpful. With sites like Krugle coming soon, code will be even easier to find. This really is a great time to learn how to program, or to hone your skills! I look forward to the next generation of coders!