How do you “pirate” .Net?

pjmlp · on Sept 27, 2018

By pirating Visual Studio before .NET went open source.

Express versions were only allowed for education purposes, and only started to be available around Visual Studio 2008.

The original .NET SDK was a bare bones command line SDK without any of the tooling that actually makes development in .NET actually worthwhile.

scarface74 · on Sept 27, 2018

The original link is dead, but the following post quotes from it.

https://forums.asp.net/t/1204510.aspx?visual+studio+express+...

Can I use Express Editions for commercial use? Yes, there are no licensing restrictions for applications built using Visual Studio Express Editions.

pjmlp · on Sept 27, 2018

Express version did not support Visual Studio plugins.

manigandham · on Sept 27, 2018

...so? You can still build applications with it. Obviously functionality will be limited but plugins are not required to get things done.

scarface74 · on Sept 27, 2018

Which video studio plugins did you need to do development?

We couldn’t use it in 2008 because we needed to use the Windows Mobile emulator.

pjmlp · on Sept 29, 2018

DirectX debugging, IIS integration, SharePoint, architecture modelling tools, database management.

scarface74 · on Oct 2, 2018

IIS integration - you publish your website to IIS

Database management - sql server management studio has always been a free tool.

Architecture modeling tools - not required for development.

Directs debugging - how many enterprise developers are doing anything with DirectX?

Share point - you couldn’t pay me enough to do Sharepoint development. That’s not exactly a popular use case these days.