Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Microsoft Responds to Development Tools Discussion
Posted by Andy Sjostrom in "DEVELOPER" @ 12:35 AM
We have discussed the ongoing changes on the mobile application development tools arena during the past few weeks. I first posted on the subject in the "Is Free a Make or Break Issue?" (Mar 11) and continued and tried to conclude the discussion in the article "Be Free Or Not Be Free" (Apr 10).
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from David Rasmussen, Lead Product Manager for the .NET Compact Framework, with a response to the open questions. David Rasmussen does a good job in explaining the strategies and thinking, and I am sure many will like what he says about a standalone .NET Compact Framework SDK. Click "more" to read the entire response.
"Hi,
I'm the Lead Product Manager for the .NET Compact Framework at Microsoft. I'm sorry it has taken a while for us to chime in on this, but we've been digesting a number of things and we've been kept fairly busy recently with our launch.
It's good to see so much debate and interest in this topic, and it is certainly helpful for us in thinking about our plans. We are listening.
Much of Andy's assessment is on the mark. There are several reasons behind including device development capability in Visual Studio .NET. First, it enables a mass of Visual Studio desktop developers to very easily build apps for devices right out of the box (click a different project type, same IDE, forms designer support, same coding model, consistent classes etc.), we think that's a good thing for the Pocket PC market that will drive a lot more apps from developers who aren't targeting them today. Second, it brings the device coding experience up to par with the desktop experience, anyone who coded with eVB and Visual Studio knows the difference in capability of these two environments. We wanted to eliminate that disparity and give device developers the best possible IDE and development environment we could. Third, it allowed us to do more with the resources we had. Taking this approach of integrating with Visual Studio we can take advantage of all the investments in Visual Studio (IDE, designers, compilers, testing teams etc.). If we had a completely separate set of tools, those same resources would have to invest more time in redoing all this work and less time in adding great new features.
There are several reasons we charge for our tools, revenue is obviously one of them, but most importantly, that money is what enables us to continually reinvest in those tools. Free tools tend to get stale and get less attention and investment in innovation (that's part of the reason eVT was lagging desktop tools in terms of features). Also, it imposes a certain amount of discipline on us to force us to continue to innovate, improve and demonstrate value to our developer customers to justify the price. We think that this approach has proven its value over the years, there are free tools out there, but millions of people continue to buy Visual Studio for good reason. We hope that all of you who've tried Visual Studio .NET and .NET Compact Framework will agree that we've made some pretty dramatic improvements in the device development experience and set the base for a lot more innovation to come, and many developers seem pleased to be able to get the value of that even if for a certain price (rather than it never making it to the market at all...).
I'd also like to address the specific point of the SDK. The fact that we don't have a stand alone SDK for the first release of .NET Compact Framework is regrettable. It's not an explicit part of our strategy. It fundamentally came down to a resource constraint. We really wanted to ship the .NET Compact Framework as soon as we could and we wanted to keep the feature set high. Several things ended up getting cut to meet this goal. A standalone SDK was one of them (there's more work involved than one might expect). We knew this would be a painful cut, in hindsight it's probably even more painful than we anticipated. It is our intent to offer an SDK for the next release of the .NET Compact Framework, so hopefully that clarifies our intent for the future.
And on one final point regarding the different audiences Andy describes, it was definitely not an explicit part of our strategy to trade off making things easier for existing Visual Studio developers at the expense of hobbyists. We love hobbyist developers, most of us here in the developer division at Microsoft (including the marketers :-) are hobbyist developers in our spare time. Hobbyists always add a richness to any platform. But as you can see above, we had multiple input factors leading us to include the device development features in Visual Studio .NET and overall we thought it was a significant advantage for the majority of our customers including hobbyists. We do try to address this community in several ways with special pricing programs like Academic pricing and cheap upgrade pricing, also we license Visual Studio to enterprises on terms (per developer) that allow developers who use Visual Studio at work to also install it on their home machines for use at home for their own projects. Many device hobbyist developers are professionals by day. We know that these programs unfortunately don't cover everyone, but we do try.
Thanks for all the discussion and input, and for those of you using the Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Compact Framework, I hope you've been pleased with the value of it."
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from David Rasmussen, Lead Product Manager for the .NET Compact Framework, with a response to the open questions. David Rasmussen does a good job in explaining the strategies and thinking, and I am sure many will like what he says about a standalone .NET Compact Framework SDK. Click "more" to read the entire response.
"Hi,
I'm the Lead Product Manager for the .NET Compact Framework at Microsoft. I'm sorry it has taken a while for us to chime in on this, but we've been digesting a number of things and we've been kept fairly busy recently with our launch.
It's good to see so much debate and interest in this topic, and it is certainly helpful for us in thinking about our plans. We are listening.
Much of Andy's assessment is on the mark. There are several reasons behind including device development capability in Visual Studio .NET. First, it enables a mass of Visual Studio desktop developers to very easily build apps for devices right out of the box (click a different project type, same IDE, forms designer support, same coding model, consistent classes etc.), we think that's a good thing for the Pocket PC market that will drive a lot more apps from developers who aren't targeting them today. Second, it brings the device coding experience up to par with the desktop experience, anyone who coded with eVB and Visual Studio knows the difference in capability of these two environments. We wanted to eliminate that disparity and give device developers the best possible IDE and development environment we could. Third, it allowed us to do more with the resources we had. Taking this approach of integrating with Visual Studio we can take advantage of all the investments in Visual Studio (IDE, designers, compilers, testing teams etc.). If we had a completely separate set of tools, those same resources would have to invest more time in redoing all this work and less time in adding great new features.
There are several reasons we charge for our tools, revenue is obviously one of them, but most importantly, that money is what enables us to continually reinvest in those tools. Free tools tend to get stale and get less attention and investment in innovation (that's part of the reason eVT was lagging desktop tools in terms of features). Also, it imposes a certain amount of discipline on us to force us to continue to innovate, improve and demonstrate value to our developer customers to justify the price. We think that this approach has proven its value over the years, there are free tools out there, but millions of people continue to buy Visual Studio for good reason. We hope that all of you who've tried Visual Studio .NET and .NET Compact Framework will agree that we've made some pretty dramatic improvements in the device development experience and set the base for a lot more innovation to come, and many developers seem pleased to be able to get the value of that even if for a certain price (rather than it never making it to the market at all...).
I'd also like to address the specific point of the SDK. The fact that we don't have a stand alone SDK for the first release of .NET Compact Framework is regrettable. It's not an explicit part of our strategy. It fundamentally came down to a resource constraint. We really wanted to ship the .NET Compact Framework as soon as we could and we wanted to keep the feature set high. Several things ended up getting cut to meet this goal. A standalone SDK was one of them (there's more work involved than one might expect). We knew this would be a painful cut, in hindsight it's probably even more painful than we anticipated. It is our intent to offer an SDK for the next release of the .NET Compact Framework, so hopefully that clarifies our intent for the future.
And on one final point regarding the different audiences Andy describes, it was definitely not an explicit part of our strategy to trade off making things easier for existing Visual Studio developers at the expense of hobbyists. We love hobbyist developers, most of us here in the developer division at Microsoft (including the marketers :-) are hobbyist developers in our spare time. Hobbyists always add a richness to any platform. But as you can see above, we had multiple input factors leading us to include the device development features in Visual Studio .NET and overall we thought it was a significant advantage for the majority of our customers including hobbyists. We do try to address this community in several ways with special pricing programs like Academic pricing and cheap upgrade pricing, also we license Visual Studio to enterprises on terms (per developer) that allow developers who use Visual Studio at work to also install it on their home machines for use at home for their own projects. Many device hobbyist developers are professionals by day. We know that these programs unfortunately don't cover everyone, but we do try.
Thanks for all the discussion and input, and for those of you using the Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Compact Framework, I hope you've been pleased with the value of it."
