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Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Tools like this have always been how Microsoft segments the highest-price "Ultimate" version of Visual Studio (or whatever MS marketing has renamed things this month).

As best I can tell there is no mention in this article of how this feature will be priced, which winds up limiting how often it will be useful simply because of availability. Let me know when this shows up in the free SKUs ("Express") or perhaps even the drug-pusher-like "Community" (first hit is free, unless/until you're making money) edition.

It is perfectly reasonable on their part as a company selling dev tools to do this; I just feel like I'm window-shopping, unable to actually afford the really cool bits. In my dreams I am way off base and this functionality is freely available for all now - I kind of have the feeling something similar been around for a while in the Ultimate SKU.

(Also, let me know if this ever comes to managed code.)

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> even the drug-pusher-like "Community" (first hit is free, unless/until you're making money) edition.

I mean, yeah it's not free-for-all, but "first hit is free" is kind of unfair. A company is not allowed to use it if they have more than "(a) more than 250 PCs or users or (b) one million U.S. dollars... in annual revenues" [1], and if it doesn't meet that criteria, it's usage is limited to 5 concurrent instances. More accurate would be "first hits are free, and you won't start getting charged until you're big enough where you can afford it".

Just making the distinction because I still have friends who think they can't use Community at home if they want to have a side project that makes money.

[1]: https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/

In case there's any confusion whether or not I agree with you, here's the very next thing I wrote:

> It is perfectly reasonable on their part as a company selling dev tools to do this

The Community edition licensing terms are, at best, awkward. I personally would have the hardest time with the 250 user limit - can I publish a free mobile app without fear this restriction might kick in?

It is not as blatant as the BizSpark / Imagine (DreamSpark) programs, so I guess that's a plus. The end result looks close enough to be considered the same to me.

Yep, it's annoying to have those limitations, but I sort of understand why. They could make their message a lot clearer though.

> I personally would have the hardest time with the 250 user limit

From the document, the text is "more than 250 PCs or users", so my understanding is that a company is limited if it has >= 250 computer users, not 250 customers. E.g. you could have a million free app users and it would be fine.

That fact that I had to preface that with "my understanding is that" means that the document is fuzzy, which is annoying, but at least further documents[2] can clarify a bit:

> - Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community, to create their own free or paid apps. > - In non-enterprise organizations up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted for employees as well as contractors beyond... [the exceptions as noted].

[2]: https://www.visualstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Visu...

So you (as an individual not as part of a company) could create a paid or mobile app and have as many users as you want and make as much as you can. If you're a company, then you need to be under 250 PCs, <= $1M, and <= 5 Visual Studio users and you're still good. Exceed those numbers and you have to pay up.

It's freely available in the Windows 10 store as "WinDbg Preview". I recall reading somewhere that they will be rolling it into the Windows SDK once the preview is complete.

WinDbg can work with managed code through extensions, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/de....

>Also, let me know if this ever comes to managed code.

For managed code, VS2010 (Ultimate) introduced Intellitrace for C# .NET code. It let you step "backwards" which is a form of "time travel".

Since 2010, people have wondered if Microsoft was going to introduce a similar debugging capability for C++. It looks like they did -- but instead of reusing the previous "Intellitrace" brand and calling it "Intellitrace for C++", they've labeled it "Time Travel Debugging".

Thanks for straightening out my confusion!

Intellitrace and TTD take different approaches and have very different trade offs. Intellitrace allows imposing logging on a system posthoc. TTD records everything the system does. They are not merely labeled differently they are different in kind. The consequences of those trade offs make the pragmatic use cases very different. Intellitrace was always intended to head toward logging in production systems, which i believe it has achieved now. It’s unlikely you would TTD a server in production without a very good reason. It is possible for a Intellitrace log to not have enough information to debug a problem. A TTD trace has fundamentally captured everything, its bigger, a bit more unwieldy... but in a deeper sense it is complete.

TTD is a feature of WinDbg (free), not VS.

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