Amidst all the excitement, it’s easy to forget that anybody in Microsoft’s vast, sprawling EMEA Region won’t be able to get Beta 2 until April 25th. Unless you have an MSDN Universal subscription, of course. Which most of you do, you tarts.
What I’ve seen of Whidbey is great. I saw Scott Guthrie on his whistle-stop European tour a few months ago and some of the productivity stuff is like black magic. People will moan that they should be able to have an MSDN Maximum Extreme edition that gets them not only every possible configuration of Visual Studio, but also access on a deep, quantum level, to the inner workings of Microsoft’s best minds, enterprise programmers will continue much as they have before. But what’s a real crime is that the Express products won’t be free. There’s no real reason to give them away, I suppose. They’re great products. I’m not even convinced that my Enterprise Developer edition of 2003 is any better than the Web, C# and SQL products combined. But I can only image how exciting it would have been to see hobbyists everywhere rediscovering programming. I’m still amazed by the number of communities that remain interested in Microsoft’s last free development environment, QBasic. Sure, most people with their copies of Design Patterns and Code Complete vomit a little every time they think of QBasic and Visual Basic and having FUN while programming. But unless the Express Editions get bundled as a throwaway extra with your new laptop (like OneNote), most people are never going to use them (like OneNote). And I think that’s a huge opportunity missed.
