Comment by JanneVee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JanneVee | Hacker News Reader

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I've said in other places and I'll say it again. One of the problems is that Microsoft also takes a lot of money for their dev tools. The express editions are limited with the things that can help your apps shine. AFAIK profiling is only available in VS 2012 Professional and up. $500 can be hard to justify for a moonlighting app dev. Heck I've even worked at companies where $500 for a dev tool was too much.

This is actually contrary to Apple where they give you every opportunity with their tools to make shiny apps and make their platform a joy to use.

And also I'm not saying that Microsoft should give away their tools for free. I just think that the cost is too prohibitive to individual developers who would like to make their apps "great" instead of "good enough". This could mean that the store would be full of "good enough" apps. And if it is only "good enough" why charge more?

Assuming I have a monitor, keyboard, etc. the cheapest I can get into developing for iOS is $699- the cost of buying a MacMini and paying for an Apple Developer license. Since the baseline MacMini probably isn't enough machine for most developers push that to $899 or $1099.

On the other side of that coin users are buying iOS devices which net Apple huge profits. Sure the high end Microsoft dev tools are spendy, but don't act like Apple is helping developers out.

It is not that Apple go out of their way to help their devs out. But buying a computer and buying a dev tool license are two different things requiring two different mindsets(think utilisation). And $500 for VS is the lowest end of the paid visual studio. Like I stated in my first post I'm not saying that they should give it away everything for free I just think that lowest end should be cheaper to give the opportunity to individual devs to make better apps.

Somewhere in Microsoft's history there lives the bean counter that took down the company. He's the guy who insisted on protecting the tiny stream of income Microsoft earns from their development tools. He's the guy who turned off a generation of programmers, and pushed them to Java and open source.

I'm sure I read that the tiny stream of revenue is $1BN per year.

Visual Studio Premium is the first version with a profiler. It's currently $6200.

According to http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/compare#f... it is professional for VS 2012. But it is still expensive unless you are dedicated.

Other profilers are available.

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