MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

> When did Visual Studio go free? Didn't you have to donate a lung in the past to buy
> it?

About 3-4 weeks ago I think. They made it way more useful for open source projects.

http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs

Basically it is the pro version and called it community. So it doesnt have that cool code rewind thing. But other than that it is very usable. They also had a stripped down version for awhile (express). There are limits on usage. Like no more than 5 copies in an company. Basically to stop companies from using only the free version as they should buy MSDN anyway. It is unlimited for an open source project. They are talking about porting it to other platforms and integrating clang and GCC into it for the next version. So sorta free as in beer.

Also it (is?)/was about 500 bucks before like it had been for a long time.

The downside is 2013 is a pig in memory and disk. It makes 2008 seem snappy in comparison. But at least it is better than eclipse in that regard.

They basically had to. As at this point all the other IDE's are free. It made sense to charge 10x less than everyone else when it cost 20k to setup one mac dev platform in the 90s. But now its near hardware cost...