There was few of My Friends speaking about .NET not being a Free or Open Source Software, as a result I am dedicating this to all the people who talk about the same.
Check the below products whats on offering and whats happening in the .NET World.
1. Visual Studio Express Editions
This is the Expansion and the limited Edition of Visual Studio and SQL Server products.
It consists of
a. Visual Basic Express Edition
b. Visual C# Express Edition
c. Visual C++ Express Edition
d. Visual Web Developer Express Edition etc
Just check their Website the FAQS state that it can be used for Commercial Purposes and its Free.
2. Visual Studio Professional/Standard / Team System
These are the products that has almost all the Features of the word .NET and it varies on the Professional, Standard and Team System that is been used. Check www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/ for details
Also check out the following programmes from Microsoft
1. Dream Spark
This is a Microsoft’s programme that gives students Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools at no charge. Check for details
2. BizSpark
This programme is intended to support the startup Companies. The enrollment fee is around $100 and you will end up getting Most of the Microsoft’s Softwares for your startup. Check http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ for details
Other Projects Revolving around .NET
1. Sharp Develop
From Wiki:
SharpDevelop is a free and open source IDE for the C#, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Boo, and (starting from version 3.0) F# and Iron Python programming languages. It is typically used as an alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET.
Check http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ to know more about the project.
2. Mono Project
Another Open Source Project.
From Wiki :
Mono is a project led by Novell (formerly by Ximian) to create an Ecma standard compliant, .NET-compatible set of tools, including among others a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on Linux, BSD, UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows operating systems.
Companies Currently using Mono :
- Novell Novell uses Mono for both client and server applications
- Cogmation uses Mono on their robotics software to drive the scripting in their platform
- And many more .
Check http://mono-project.com/ for more details on the Mono Project
3. C# in Eclipse.
There is a free open Source c# plugin for Eclipse.How good it would be to use the Eclipse to Code C# .The plugin just does the same.
Check to know more about the same.
There is still lots more and will update the same as and when I get to know some.
2 Comments
Microsoft .net still requires you to obtain software from Microsoft, and this is a restriction. Mono doesn’t do everything that Microsoft’s version does.
Also, it is pretty hard to run .net tools on Mac, Linux or something else that isn’t Windows. This is also very restrictive. I have seen a lot of Windows developers that buy Mac computers at home, and I have even been to a Windows .net developer conference where the speaker used a Mac that virtualized Windows in order to show the .net part of it (but his presentation was running on Mac OS X). So even for Windows developers, the urge to use something else as Windows is huge, but Microsoft .net is preventing them from doing it fully.
Microsoft .net is only really free, when you don’t need to agree to a Microsoft license and don’t need to pay for any software to use it, including the Windows license.
Most other common development tools are truly free.
It seems you don’t know what Free means, look-up free as in Freedom vs free as in beer. Maybe you could bing it.