[Interest] MSVC not-the-latest: are you using it? why?

[Adam Light]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 4:41 PM Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
wrote:

>
> Ah, interesting. I'd completely forgotten Visual Studio is a paid product
> (who
> had the bright idea of charging for the ability to develop software for a
> given OS? Don't they want to enrich said OS with more software?). I only
> use
> the Build Tools because I only build SW on Windows from the command line,
> after pushing there from my Linux development machine.
>
>
According to https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/?q=build+tools,
  "These Build Tools [...]. Use of this tool requires a valid Visual Studio
license."

In my experience, it is possible to install the IDE (which also installs
the build tools) and continue using the build tools even after the IDE will
refuse to run because your demo period has expired.

We don't use the IDE for much other than debugging minidumps we get from
customers when our application crashes, so perhaps we could just download
the build tools and not pay the license fee, but it's a bit ambiguous to me.


>  I am wondering if the VS 2019 IDE can drive builds with the VS 2022 Build
> Tools.
>
>
I don't have VS 2019 installed so I don't know. I do have 2017 installed
and tried to check, but my trial period has expired so I can't use the IDE
enough to actually test this.




> What I also didn't know is that if you've purchased the licence for a
> given
> VS, you're not entitled to the upgrade to the next. I know this is how it
> used
> to be with Microsoft Office back in the 90s and even the old Visual
> Studios, but
> I thought this practice was long gone. You can upgrade Windows for free,
> after
> all.
>

There are a lot of different licensing schemes for Visual Studio, so I
would not be surprised if what you said is true for some people.

I purchased a single-user perpetual license to VS 2019 through the
Microsoft Store several years ago and was not eligible for a free upgrade
(or low-cost upgrade) to VS 2022, as far as I could tell. In fact, after VS
2022 was officially released, it was not even possible to purchase a
perpetual license on the MS store. I had to file a bug report with the VS
project and have that percolate through several layers of bureaucracy for
about a month before I could even give MS my money.

I think MS wants people to buy their subscriptions, not perpetual licenses.
Our product's release cycle is around 3 years, and we use the same version
of Visual Studio and Qt for that period, so the subscription doesn't pay
off for us.

Adam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20230125/bb778b2c/attachment.htm>