[Python-Dev] Visual studio 2005 express now free

Fri Apr 21 19:12:57 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Microsoft just announced that Visual Studio 2005 express will be free
> forever, including the IDE and the optimizing C++ compiler. (Not
> included in the "forever" clause are VS 2007 or later versions.)
>> Does this make a difference for Python development for Windows?

For future versions, perhaps. For 2.5, I think we now have settled
on VS 2003, for several reasons:
- I personally consider VS 2005 still verdant (crude? immature?
 unfledged?). They can't really mean the whole breakage they have
 done to the C library. Also, I expect another release of VS
 after Vista, to cover all the new .NET API, and I hope that
 we can skip VS 2005 (although Vista gets delays, and so gets
 VS 2007)
- Fredrik Lundh points out that it would be nice if people producing
 extensions for multiple Python releases wouldn't need a separate
 compiler for each release.
- Paul Moore has contributed a Python build procedure for the
 free version of the 2003 compiler. This one is without IDE,
 but still, it should allow people without a VS 2003 license
 to work on Python itself; it should also be possible to develop
 extensions with that compiler (although I haven't verified
 that distutils would pick that up correctly).
Regards,
Martin