[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.

[mschaef]

You seem to think we disagree, and reading through your points, I'm honestly not sure why.

[biggestdecision]

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

Doubly so if you are a newcomer to programming.