[biggestdecision]

I think a main reason Microsoft lost their development community is because they charged for access to Visual studio (which is the gateway to the entire ecosystem). People didn't talk about it openly, because no one was building for the microsoft platform outside of work.

Meanwhile a whole community of competing free alternatives appeared - students learnt Java and Python because C# was a paid product that was also not cross platform.

[addicted]

Visual Studio was/is super expensive and also necessary for MS development.

With .Net core you can get by with never touching VS. But that wasn’t always the case.

I also don’t believe MS had a free livense of Visual Studio like they do now.

[poorpoorstudent]

When I was a poor Comp Sci student I couldn't afford Visual Studio so I got an IRC buddy to mail me a pirated copy of Visual Studio Enterprise Edition (gotta love rural dial-up internet.) This was around 2003 I believe.

Package never arrived, so I got him to re-send it. Got the discs a few weeks later.

Some time later I got a call from the RCMP -- Canadian version of the FBI. They wanted me to come to their detachment and answer some questions. When I showed up they took me into an interrogation room and told me they had seized the CD-Rs at the border, that software piracy was a big deal and he had been instructed by his superiors to "make an example out of someone."

They wanted to know who sent them, how I got in contact with him, how much I had paid him, and a lot of other questions. I was 19 and scared shitless. I had seen the warnings at the beginning of Hollywood movies, I should have asked for a lawyer but didn't.

I gave a statement and signed it. I told them that the guy had re-sent the discs and I received them, what should I do? They told me to bring the discs in, and I did.

Never heard from them again. No criminal record. I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I thank my lucky stars that I wasn't charged with copyright infringement.

I'm not trying to paint this as some kind of Les Miserables bread-loaf-stealing tragedy, but I am beyond ecstatic at the wealth of free software development tools available to anyone with a $400 laptop.

[pjmlp]

That free license was called Express, was available per language variant, so you needed on VS Express install per workload and exists since around 2005, until Community made its appearance.

Also the Windows SDK was always available for free, just you needed to get a C compiler yourself.

[mschaef]

> Also the Windows SDK was always available for free, just you needed to get a C compiler yourself.

Not quite _always_... For the first few versions of Windows, the SDK was a fairly expensive separate product you had to buy in addition to the compilers itself. I'm pretty sure it was MS C/C++ 7 that was first available bundled with the SDK. IIRC, the product was $700-800 (in 1990 money), took a couple feet of shelf space, and shipped with seven or eight thousand pages of documentation.

Visual C++ (really MS C/C++ _8_) democratized it a bunch by shipping with the libraries/tools needed to develop for Windows and offering a basic product at a <$200 price point. That was also the first version of Microsoft C that shipped with a Windows-based debugging UI.

The early 90's also saw the introduction of MSDN - the Microsoft Developer Network. At the time, this was a subscription CD based library of essentially all of Microsoft's developer documentation (as well as a few tools, etc.) It was essential... and to put the timeline in perspective, Microsoft sold a version of MSDN that was bundled with a CD-ROM drive, since they were as uncommon as they were at the time. They quickly added a premium version of MSDN that got you the full tooling also.

Ten or fifteen years after all that, the full version of Visual Studio was a $10k/seat proposition. Between that and all of the API churn, they lost sight of their original goal of staying developer friendly, and it was to their deteriment. (Particularly given the concurrent ascendence of the Web, OS X, Mobile, Linux, and the like.)

[teh_klev]

> subscription CD based library

Back in the 90's I used to be the custodian and curator of our great big box of MSDN CD's ensuring that updates and replacements were properly seen to. Oh the memories :)

In fairness you didn't just get the development tools, you also got copies of just about every MS server and office product on what were fairly generous developer licenses. Many of these things didn't even require phoning home for "activation" and MS turned a blind eye to partners sharing one copy amongst 10-15 devs; after all the real money was where the fruit of our efforts would be deployed, stuff running in banks and other corporates paying serious coin for server licenses and direct support. Ultimately all this stuff was about capturing developers mindsets with a view to selling production licenses.

[mschaef]

> In fairness you didn't just get the development tools, you also got copies of just about every MS server and office product on what were fairly generous developer licenses.

It didn't start out that way... they added a premium level later, and that was the version that included all the free tooling. I still have volumes 3 and 5 (April 1993 and Fall 1993), and it's a single CD product that was mostly focused on just the documentation. (This is actually how I got my first CD-ROM drive... IIRC, the whole package, a one year subscription and a proprietary interface CD-ROM was $400).

[pjmlp]

I started developing for Windows 3.0 using Borland tools and never paid more than 100 euro (when converted for today's money) with their Turbo C++ and Pascal compilers, the Windows SDK was in the box.

Have been developing for Windows and UNIX flavors ever since.

Windows has been always developer friendly from my point of view, more so than UNIX ever was, then again I guess we have different points of view what being developer friendly actually means.

[mschaef]

> I started developing for Windows 3.0 using Borland tools and never paid more than 100 euro (when converted for today's money) with their Turbo C++ and Pascal compilers, ...

> I guess we have different points of view what being developer friendly actually means.

We may be in more agreement than you suspect, for what it's worth - I think it's mainly a matter of timing. The development community, including Borland, pivoted from OS/2 to Windows right around the 1990 release of 3.0. That forced Microsoft to open up a lot of the tooling required to compile Windows binaries. (IIRC, the effort was something like Open Tools, and there was also ToolHelp, which was Microsoft's way of opening up Win16 debugger support that had been previously proprietary.) This was a big part of the reason that companies like Borland could ship products that let you code for Windows without an SDK.

Prior to that point... 1985-1989/90, the situation was a lot more closed and tools like the SDK were extra cost add ons.

[pjmlp]

Borland just made one attempt at OS/2, and it wasn't as good as Visual Age for C++ and CSet++. There was hardly anything to pivot from.

As for Windows 1.0 - 2.0, which is the time frame you are talking about, Windows did not matter at all. We only cared about MS-DOS and compatibles.

And on MS-DOS, their Pascal and C offerings were quite lousy when compared with the competition, so we were gladly giving money to TMT, Borland, Nanuteck, Gardens Point, Watcom.

They were also ironically the last C compiler vendor for MS-DOS to add support for C++, the very last edition of their compiler for MS-DOS, Microsoft C/C++ v7.

And in what concerns freely available, MS-DOS did not had any SDK, so yeah we had to pay for a book with the BIOS and Int 21h documentation, like PC Systems Internals.

[biggestdecision]

Using the Windows SDK without Visual Studio is a not great experience though.

Doubly so if you are a newcomer to programming.

[ripley12]

I really don't understand Microsoft's pricing model for Visual Studio.

In theory, it's just price discrimination; put features that are only valuable to enterprise customers in the $6k/year version, and profit. But then they put key UX features which are useful to _everyone_, like Live Unit Testing, in the Enterprise version too.

The upshot is that they sell a few more Enterprise licenses, but the development experience is worse for 99% of .NET developers on Windows. It's such a weird contrast to their developer tooling strategy in every other area.

[pjmlp]

Lost?

Most countries have Microsoft sponsored education programs and all big software shops have MSDN subscriptions anyway.