Let me introduce Jesper’s first axiom of developer tool pricing: if they’re trying to hide the price from you, there’s probably a reason for it.
The plaintiff calls to the stand: Visual Studio Team System for Developers. Microsoft goes to their utmost to hide the price (or even a Buy Now link), but at their store’s product page, all is revealed. $2299. And that’s if you have an MSDN Premium subscription that you’re renewing. Otherwise it’s $5469.
Why Visual Studio Team System for Developers? Because it is, believe it or not, the cheapest version of Visual Studio with any half-competent profiler whatsoever. (Yes, Microsoft offers a free CLR Profiler with source provided (!), but it is clumsy, can’t attach to running programs and only tracks memory allocation and not method performance.)
I’m starting to agree with Wil Shipley’s famous paraphrasing: “If you disagree, let me make you a deal: I’ll sell you all the tools you need to write software to compete with Delicious Library. Just send me a check for $600 every year and, uh, I’ll get back to you… maybe. I totally promise the tools will be really great, too. Really.”
But we’re not there yet. Microsoft is making good tools, and Microsoft is – sloooooooooowly – adopting .NET for its own application development. (Large chunks of the SQL Server 2005 management interface is written in .NET, if I’m not mistaken.)
What instead bugs me is that Microsoft is making you sell your house and take out a mortgage on the same first-born whose civil rights you just resigned in their EULA just to be able to make efficient and good software. What Microsoft doesn’t need is more crappy software on their platform; they get enough of that already, as you might have noticed. But instead of providing their best tools for a nominal cost, fleecing their base for a tidy short-term profit is more worth than restoring their reputation.
No wonder people are starting to peer over the fence where wonderful Instruments tidily arrive for zero cost right on the installation DVD; all of it part of a toolchain consisting of the same exact tools Apple themselves use, for free.
(Yes, I know about other people than Microsoft developing developer tools; I have been and will continue to use the wondrous free and open source AnkhSVN for version control, but the closest reputable profiler is JetBrains’ dotTrace, skidding in at a perhaps relatively facile and competitive $499, and has the Visual Studio integration of a toothpick.)
Having already bought Team/Developers (or rather, already having an MSDN subscription through my job), it’s rather hard to justify spending another significant fraction of that on a separate profiling tool.
I’ve dabbled with dotTrace a bit though, and lack of VS integration aside, the navigation and filtering ability seems better than what VS provides. (I can’t find any filtering in the VS interface… but that might just be because I prefer printed manuals to trawling through MSDN.)
Profile sessions with the VS tool always seem to result in re-learning that, yes, I sure am allocating a bunch of strings and int32s.
MS really needs to get on the ball with this one.
By http://piehead.livejournal.com/ · 2007.10.16 15:34