StackOverflowVisual Studio 11 Express - No support for building desktop applications nor metro style enabled desktop browsers
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Visual Studio 11 Express - No support for building desktop applications nor metro style enabled desktop browsers
Last modified: Sunday, May 27, 2012
Microsoft announced last week that Visual Studio 11 Express will not have support for building Desktop applications, by extension this also means that it will not have support for building metro style enabled desktop browsers.
The workaround is to install Visual Studio 2010 and use the Windows 8 SDK. This isn't a good solution, but it's even worse when you consider metro style enabled desktop browsers. This workaround won't work for metro style enabled desktop browsers that need the Visual Studio 11 compiler. The Windows 8 SDK no longer ships with a compiler of its own.
Firefox can be built with a configuration option to disable the metro bits, so you'll still be able to use Visual Studio 2010 Express to develop on Windows 8, but not if you want to work on Metro related things. In that case, you'll need to use a paid version of Visual Studio 11.
As we've seen with Visual Studio 11 though, who itself can't target Windows XP, this will eventually become a problem as Windows versions increase if no change is made by Microsoft.
I hope that Microsoft will come out with an edition of Visual Studio 11 Express for desktop development, because it hurts open source projects that want to develop for Windows 8 and beyond.
If you also think this will hurt open source development in the long run, you can vote to add support for desktop development back into Visual Studio 2010 Express. Vote it, tweet it, blog it, add comments to it.
Microsoft has previously claimed that it loves open source:
"We love open source," says Jean Paoli of Microsoft in a recent interview with Network World. "We have worked with open source for a long time now."
Actions speak louder than words, please show us.
Tags: mozilla firefox visual-studio windows8
Add a new comment | 4 comment(s)
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Long-term, have you considered migrating Firefox to build with a MinGW toolchain instead? |
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We do have some contributors building that way but it's not currently the primary way people build. And our Nightly builds and tests all run with builds made with Visual Studio currently. That wouldn't help with the Metro related bits problem also. |
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Microsoft doesn't like open source/free software. Microsoft doesn't like competition. Open source is the worst kind of competition for Microsoft. You've 2 alternatives: don't develop for windows, find an alternative. Don't beg. Makes you look weak! Gives credence to those that say that open source is for "hobbyists". |
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Please see here: Microsoft does like open source, they just made a temporary bad decision which they corrected. Also there's a big difference between advocating and begging. |
