Has anyone seen the new Community Edition of Visual Studio?  Basically, it's Visual Studio Professional, but completely free for individual developers and small business use.  Corporate use still requires a Professional license, however.

No more pirating Visual Studio, yay!

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2013-community-vs.aspx

Yes, I have heard of that. Looks awesome! Though I am presently using some fully licensed VS installs, but if I need to move on I'll definitely be getting this.

I'm fairly indifferent to this. I usually use a compiler-independent build system (wrapped through MSVC's 'external build tools' setup on Windows), I far prefer command-line git and using the base filesystem for organization. I'm not much for managed code, either.

So I guess for me it's not particularly better than Visual Studio Express. I am interested in the Android build setup, though. I find Google's tools just a bit lacking, particularly on Windows, so that sounds intriguing to me.

Yes, I have heard of that. Looks awesome! Though I am presently using some fully licensed VS installs, but if I need to move on I'll definitely be getting this.

It's literally Visual Studio Professional 2013, just without the enterprise development license.  Unless you're writing software for a big corporation (are you, Radnen?  I honestly don't know ), there's literally no reason not to upgrade.

edit: Hm, apparently MS is also open-sourcing .NET and putting it on GitHub even!  That's awesome!

Ok, so I put this on another machine since my student copy was only good for two computers and dang this community edition is just perfect! It makes me suddenly want to work on my C# projects now.

edit: Hm, apparently MS is also open-sourcing .NET and putting it on GitHub even!  That's awesome!

That happened a month or two ago, but yes! I am excited about this. Hopefully with this information Mono will reach better parity with MS's .NET, and MS's .NET will have a chance at working on other platforms.

Ok, so I put this on another machine since my student copy was only good for two computers and dang this community edition is just perfect! It makes me suddenly want to work on my C# projects now.

Yeah, VS 2013 is really, really nice.  Say what you will about Microsoft, but they sure as hell know how to make an awesome IDE.  Have you tried Map Mode for the scrollbars?  It's kind of a gimmicky feature, but still neat.

And nevermind C#, I almost want to play around with C++ again because of this.  VC++ Express was badly hobbled (no Win32 resource editor, for example), so I kind of got away from it.

And nevermind C#, I almost want to play around with C++ again because of this.  VC++ Express was badly hobbled (no Win32 resource editor, for example), so I kind of got away from it.

Yeah, I remember coming across that same problem. I just can't see myself coding anything other than games in C++ because it's the language I hate, not the logic. I am happier with C though since it's definitely not as confusing to read/understand and is easier to make well-structured code that executes fast. It's weird, but I'm a C and C# guy but not a C++ guy since I feel C is good at what it does and C# does it better than C++ when you are doing OOP like things such as creating primarily desktop GUI apps. And for the fact a lot of good C++ is most usually good C with a few C++ features added to the mix, and good C# is leagues ahead at creating clear and concise solutions over C++. (Also if you really care about speed I'd still stick to C and even dip into assembly which I've done before since it was so easy to do (not sure if some C++ compilers can directly compile IA32)).

I can't think of a single C++ compiler that can't do inline assembly (MSVC, GCC, Clang, Sun Studio, even the crap that is DMC), and G++ and Clang even let you choose Intel or AT&T style.
Although I did find that MSVC (even in C mode) cannot do amd64, only x86. Plus, MSVC just has horrific C support. But if you are writing C, you will probably be fine crossing vendor lines.

This is just my observations, but...
I think most programmers have both a high level and a low level language they like. Maybe a couple. But they tend to dislike stuff in between those two points. I like C++ and C, and I like JavaScript and Python. But I don't like C# or Java. That middle ground surely falls in different places for different people.

I don't know, I like C/C++ and JavaScript, as well as managed stuff like C# and (you'll all laugh at me for this...) VB.NET.  I do hate Java, though, not going to lie.

My displeasure with VB.NET over VB 6 was what made me seek out an alternative and originally find Sphere.

My displeasure with VB.NET over VB 6 was what made me seek out an alternative and originally find Sphere.

I like it, and I was a VB6 user before.  Admittedly the language can be a bit overly verbose at times, but I really don't see why it gets so much hate from VB6 migrants.  Is it just because VB6 compiles to native code while VB.NET is managed, or...?  Really, the tradeoff isn't a big deal to me, you're trading the VB6 runtime for the far superior .NET CLR and base class library.  Plus you get a true object-oriented langauge--VB6 had objects, but it wasn't really OOP.  No inheritance, polymorphism, nothing.

VB6 was certainly not object oriented. But VB.NET was, and it changed quite a lot of the built in functions. It's not that VB.NET is bad, it's just a very bumpy migration from VB6, which prompted me to look around and see if the grass was greener somewhere else.

Hey, we all at least came here for the JavaScript and I don't know of very many gaming communities that center themselves around embedded JS. Whenever I tell people I make games in JS they suddenly want to see a website or a browser...!

Hey, we all at least came here for the JavaScript and I don't know of very many gaming communities that center themselves around embedded JS. Whenever I tell people I make games in JS they suddenly want to see a website or a browser...!

Interestingly, apparently Windows 8 Metro apps can also be programmed in JS.  As I found out, VS 2013 lets you create a Windows Store app project using JS as the language.  I should try messing around with that some time...