Any ideas where NETMF falls in these new targeted flavors of Express? Is it going to work with all or none of them? I don’t understand Microsoft’s urge to split a free product into so many different SKUs. It seems that it just makes more work for them.
From the second paragraph it seems like you would not be able to do NETMF development unless you have purchased VS11. To add to the confusion:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/products/express
Desktop application development
Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 provides tools for Metro style app development. To create desktop apps, you need to use Visual Studio 11 Professional, or higher. In addition, Visual Studio 2010 Express products - Visual Basic 2010 Express, Visual C++ 2010 Express, and Visual C# 2010 Express - will remain available for free download.
Seems like you will need to purchase VS11 or stick with VS10Express.
And that sound you hear is the distance is tons of people moving back to arduino because, suck though it may, it’s still free…
Seriously, Microsoft?
Do not jump to conclusions guys. Wait till you hear from the netmf team directly and you will soon.
Plus vs2010 is available wither way. So we are fine.
Further, you don’t actually NEED Visual Studio, except for Gadgeteer, right? You still have MSBuild and the compilers…
For Gadgeteer you could just write the code by hand that the visual designer does for you and then you can just use MSBuild.
Actually you do NEED the designer. Else why us C#? If you want to code without an IDE then you can just as well just move back to ANSI C and use notepad…
and let us not forget the VS debugger!
I agree with Gus; it seems like everybody is trying to ‘read between the lines’ and jump to their own conclusions. Looking at the VS11 page it seems obvious that the big push for VS11 is to provide tools for Windows 8, with Phone and Web being part of the mix. It very clearly states that all the VS 2010 Express versions will still be available; see quote below.
[quote]Desktop application development
Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 provides tools for Metro style app development. To create desktop apps, you need to use Visual Studio 11 Professional, or higher. In addition, Visual Studio 2010 Express products - Visual Basic 2010 Express, Visual C++ 2010 Express, and Visual C# 2010 Express - will remain available for free download.
[/quote]
I would guess that as time goes on the 2010 Express versions will be updated as well, but I can understand this not being a priority right now. In any case VS 2011 won’t add any new features for NETMF so staying with 2010 for a while makes no difference.
That’s a troubling statement and some speculation is warranted. It would be very unusual for Microsoft to announce a new flavor of VS11 Express after VS11 has already been launched. I’m eager to hear what the NETMF team has to announce in this regard and I think they should do it sooner rather than later. The worst thing that could happen to NETMF would be for it to branch off into some hybrid VS-like dev environment. But, I’ll patiently wait their announcement before saying more…
Hello from the NETMF team. Sorry to be slow in getting back on this. With Dev11 the flavors of the Express SKUs have changed. They are now not language specific but product specific with Win8, Web, and Phone variants. What does this mean for NETMF and Gadgeteer users? We will of course support Dev11 in NETMF and that support is planned to come out in the fall time frame and be included in 4.2 and the upcoming 4.3 releases. This will be available for users of VS Pro edition. For Express users, the Dev10 C# and VB languages will continue to be available for some time and obviously will continue to be free. In other words, for Express users, nothing changes.
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
Colin
@ Colin - So, to be clear… Beyond VS2010 there is no plan to support a free version of VS for NETMF? If this is the case, this is tragic.
Hi Ian,
Why tragic - you have the same tools you had before.
Colin, I’m thinking 2-3 years down the road. If they don’t support NETMF in VS11 Express then the message that is being shown is that an investment in NETMF now means that you will eventually have to purchase VSxx or use an “old” version of VS. This feels like bait & switch and it’s not going to be welcome in the open source community.
It certainly wasn’t intended as a Bait and Switch although it is nearly inpossible for a company this size to make a move without brusing something. Even a big company like Microsoft is continually making resource tradeoffs. For Dev11 it was to focus on specific platform scenario experiences. ‘Several years’ gives us lots of time to find ways to suuport all the markets that we are in. In the mean time, hopefully, you will be guided by the best developer experience that you can get which I still believe is VS even if it is Dev10.
I’m a paying user of VS and probably always will be so this has no impact to me. I’m also one of NETMFs biggest fans and take every chance to speak about NETMF/Gadgeteer that is offered. One of the best stories I can tell is that it costs nothing more than a $25 micro to get started. It’s now going to be hard to tell that story with a straight face because of the uncertainty this creates. NETMF is such a minor product in the Microsoft catalog it seems that it could be fitted into the desktop Express version.
I am definitely sympathetic to your concerns but perhaps more confident that we will continue to find a solution for this market. I believe that someone noted that CF support disappeared from Dev10 but they may not have noticed that it has returned in Dev11. We will continue to strive to give you that arguement that you have made - that for the cost of an inexpensive board, you can have the best development experience available. For this audience, I believe Dev10 meets that bar.
I hope that’s not because they all switched to embedded Linux. 
Keep up the great work, Colin & team. These are exciting times. I hate to see anything happen that can take the wind out of the sails.
+1.
And the open source community is going to stop buying Microsoft products in protest.
Wait… they never have bought Microsoft products. That would be a sin. 