Big announcements for developers in the Microsoft ecosystem today, Visual Studio is now free to folks that like to write code outside of enterprises (i.e. students, open source devs, home tinkerers etc…)
Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new, free and fully featured edition of Visual Studio, available today, with access to the full Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem and support for targeting any platform, from devices and desktop to web and cloud services.
As usual though the the most maligned developers in the Microsoft ecosystem, SQL Server devs, have been forgotten. There’s no full-featured version of SQL Server available for them is there? Add this to the ever-growing list of evidence that Microsoft doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the SQL Server dev community any more:
- T-SQL is a decrepit, sad, excuse for a development language with only two* significant changes (TRY…CATCH, Windowing functions) this century
- At Microsoft’s *developer* conference earlier this year there were 185 sessions. How many of those were devoted to SQL Server? One! (OK, two).
- Archaic, buggy, IDEs for SSIS & SSRS
- Ubiquitous “Won’t fix” responses on Connect
Here’s a suggestion for you Microsoft. Throw us a bone and make SQL Server Developer Edition free too. Doing so isn’t going to save the community wads of cash (it can be bought today for only $59.95 on the Microsoft Store, I’m sure that doesn’t make up much of the double-digit annual growth that they’re currently enjoying) but that’s not the point, it would send out a message. It tells us in the SQL Server community that Microsoft still cares about us, that they still want us to use their stuff. That we’re not a forgotten breed. As a SQL Server developer I haven’t felt like that for quite some time.
A pipe dream? Let’s see.
*Just my opinion. Feel free to disagree in the comments below.
