What would I have to pay for VC++ 2010 Pro in Germany?

Sorry, this one is particlularly targeted at the german users of this forum. :blush:

Unfortunately I did not get any satisfying answers on this thread, so I'm getting a bit desperate now and start a new one. That old thread has already dropped to page 5 and I fear most people won't see it there anymore. (I know that BUMPing is discouraged here but I hope linking to my own old thread is not... :blush:)

My target is to get an as-recent-as-possible VC++ together with MFC and ATL, and that at the lowest price possible. So VC++ 2010 Express Edition by itself is no viable option as it doesn't contain these two libraries.

So finally I consider to resort to actually buy the Pro Edition. My assumption that I coudn't afford it was based on Pro Edition prices of more than ten years ago. I just zapped around back and forth on the german MS pages and found nothing resembling a price tag at all. :ehh: So, could anybody tell me what would be a realistic price for VC++ 2010 Pro in Germany (and maybe even where I could get it)?

Sorry for annoyance if it was one and TIA...

Before you jump into paying for it, follow my thread here. If what I asked there is true, I'm not sure that I'd want to go with MS VS 2010.

The online microsoft store is selling the upgrade version of VS2010 professional for $299. To see what's available in Germany, you could select the Germany as the country, and you'll be shown the page in German.

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft...oduct/BE303EE9

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Originally Posted by ahmd

Before you jump into paying for it, follow my thread here. If what I asked there is true, I'm not sure that I'd want to go with MS VS 2010.

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Interesting. I didn't know that they had changed something about the 32-bit EXE format at all. :ehh: The minimum Win required to run the VS itself is XP SP3 too, but it isn't mentioned that this is true for the apps you generate as well.

At least I instantly subscribed to your thread and will follow what's going on there.

At the time it is not really a concern to me to run my apps under pre-XP versions of Win. And if some client should explicitly want that, he also may want to pay a little extra for that extra support... :cool:

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Originally Posted by spiritualfields

The online microsoft store is selling the upgrade version of VS2010 professional for $299. To see what's available in Germany, you could select the Germany as the country, and you'll be shown the page in German.

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Thanks for the pointer. :) In fact I didn't have to do some selection myself at all: The US site figuered out that I'm from Germany by itself, told me I might not be able to make a purchase there and forwarded me (after a single click) to the german site.

And on that site they sell the upgrade for 649 € (let's see whether the CG forum is Unicode-enabled... :D). That's more than twice as much they demand on the US site! :eek: The good news is that I saw no limitation on how old my previous VS version might be to get the upgrade. And if I didn't realy misunderstand them, I might even get it if I only "owned" the Express Edition!

But all the packages I saw there (both on the US and german site) appear to contain all the languages. I would be pretty much satisfied if I could get C++ alone for a little less bucks.

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Originally Posted by Eri523

But all the packages I saw there (both on the US and german site) appear to contain all the languages. I would be pretty much satisfied if I could get C++ alone for a little less bucks.

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It's been like that for a very long time. Buy the professional version and you get all languages wether you want them or not.

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The good news is that I saw no limitation on how old my previous VS version might be to get the upgrade. And if I didn't realy misunderstand them, I might even get it if I only "owned" the Express Edition!

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According to a picture of the box on the U.S.A. page, the upgrade only applies to VS2005 and VS2008 users.

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft...oduct/BE303EE9

So you should make sure of what the German requirements are before you buy it.

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Originally Posted by spiritualfields

According to a picture of the box on the U.S.A. page, the upgrade only applies to VS2005 and VS2008 users.

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If that would be true I'd be really out of luck. :(

I tried to check out the link you posted, but the site obviously rememberd me and this time it forwarded me to the german site without even requiring a single click.

So I zapped a bit around the german site and tried to find information that would confirm or contradict what you said. In fact I found two different upgrade packages. One for 349 € that actually has the limitations you mentioned, and the one for 649 € that I found in the first place that doesn't mention the limitations you observed and explicitly mentions the Express Edition as a possible starting point for the upgrade.

They also have a full version for 949 €. But if I really can update from the Express Edition that's free (or a version before VS 2005) for 300 € less I would be really silly not to do that... ;) (At least if I would want to have VS 2010 at all - see the concerns that ahmd issued earlier on this thread.)

That's how it looked on a US side (see attached). And it clearly states that it's an upgrade from 2005 or 2008 Standard, so read it carefully. Personally I doubt that they will let you use that upgrade from a free version.

If you want my opinion, I like MS VS 2008 better (if you want you can add SP1 and it will do pretty much what 2010 does but without a blue interface. OK, OK, it is obviously a facetious statement, so folks please don't point out all the good things about 2010.) My main beef with 2010 is that it enormously bloats out executables (MFC in particular) and makes code incompatible with Win2K. Read my original thread above.

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They also have a full version for 949 €. But if I really can update from the Express Edition that's free (or a version before VS 2005) for 300 € less I would be really silly not to do that... (At least if I would want to have VS 2010 at all - see the concerns that ahmd issued earlier on this thread.)

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If the literature on the site you get explicitly mentions that you can upgrade to VS2010 professional from an Express edition of Visual Studio, and if you have none of the recent versions of VS and no legacy issues with compatibility to worry about, then I'd recommend going the VS2010 route. I haven't really given it a MFC workout yet, but in respect to C++ console programs (without MFC or any precompiled headers), I notice a tremendous improvement in intellisense...in that it actually works. I'm one of those guys that can never remember all the members of cout and things like that, and would always end up researching the documentation for the proper syntax...with VS2010 the intellisense works even at that level, with little popup windows listing all the members. Since most of my programming now is console programs, I've loving this.

I created a few MFC apps just to look at the various presentations...office, ribbons, etc. and have noticed that there's a lot more baggage than before, which is probably to be expected.

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Originally Posted by spiritualfields

I notice a tremendous improvement in intellisense...

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Yes, I noticed it too. It indeed pops up for a lot of things in VS 2010, and for me the major benefit of VS 2010's intellisense is how it can show struct contents as a tree while debugging -- that is a very handy feature, but it comes with it's new pitfalls. And here are just to name a few:

1. For some weird and unknown reason some suggested APIs come with an A or W at the end. The reasoning behind that evades me. It would be very wrong to code your program specifically for ANSI or Unicode that way. So as a result I have to manually correct it by removing A's or W's.

2. For some combinations of code the intellisense clearly has a glitch. Like this one:

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VERIFY(_tprintf(_T("")));

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if you want to know the parameters for _tprintf it shows it for VERIFY instead :) Which is very annoying, and I haven't found a workaround (yet).

3. It clearly messes up some preprocessor definitions when an API is defined through them and shows the #define definition instead of an API itself. I don't remember an example now.

4. This has nothing to do with intellisense, but for some reason they redesigned the main source code window and now it has a couple of very annoying glitches like (besides having a new feel to it, which may slow you down):

A. If you select a chunk of code and miss, say, one letter at an end I'd normally begin selecting again, which for some strange reason in VS 2010 starts moving the selection. VERY annoying.

B. When you have a long selection and keep scrolling down while dragging (i.e. selecting) the window starts to scroll pretty fast. So if I miss the end of the selection, I'd normally begin dragging the mouse up to return the selection upward but for some reason this re-designed editor doesn't go up and I have to abandon it and do it all over again. It sometimes takes several times to select a big chunk of code with a mouse.

These are just to name a few. They will probably fix all this in the next release of a SP though.


spiritualfields, can you try to build your console project with MFC or ATL and see the size difference? Maybe I didn't do something right. Also check if it runs under Win2K, if it matters for you?

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if you want to know the parameters for _tprintf it shows it for VERIFY instead Which is very annoying, and I haven't found a workaround (yet).

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One thing you could do is start off the line of code with just _tprintf, and add the VERIFY wrapper after you've coded the string. However, all you'll get for popup help for _tprintf is: (const wchar_t * Format,...), which isn't much help anyway if you don't remember what the placeholder idioms are (that would be me).

I ran a console program with MFC, added no code of my own, using the default build options. The debug executable was 47K. The release executable was 8K.

With a console program, no pre-compiled headers, and a short program of only 20 lines in one file, the debug was 39K, and the release was 10k. I don't have any long programs to compare. All my work now is with short programs, reviewing things I'm rusty with...pointers, references, the stl, etc. My last serious program was written in VC 6.0. around 7 years ago, so I have some dusting off to do.

Hi Eri523,
first: I'am not an **** fan, but ...
I use the ******** often to find out a realistic market price of things I plan to buy.
So it could happen that companys have an insolvency and than they offer it as a used facility on that platform.

Hope it supports your goal.
Philaty :wave:

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Originally Posted by spiritualfields

I ran a console program with MFC, added no code of my own, using the default build options. The debug executable was 47K. The release executable was 8K.

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You link your MFC projects dynamically meaning that they use DLL libraries for the latest MFC. To ship those projects to a customer that doesn't have a development IDE installed, you will need to supply those DLLs as well, which will add up to the size. In my tests I was linking to MFC statically to avoid proving DLLs. Change to that and see the size then.

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Originally Posted by Philaty

I use the ******** often to find out a realistic market price

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Word of advice (and caution), don't use places as e-Bay. It has so much pirated stuff that you wouldn't believe it. You might get a DVD in a box only to learn later that the registration code has been pirated and is invalid. Google it for more info.

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Originally Posted by Philaty

I use the ******** often to find out a realistic market price of things I plan to buy.
So it could happen that companys have an insolvency and than they offer it as a used facility on that platform.

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Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think I can find upgrade packages there. I suppose it is simply technically impossible to sell them separately, and even if it was possible I suppose it to be pretty illegal. ;)

OTOH, a company going bankrupt might even sell a full version at a price below the usual upgrade. :ehh:

I have no experience with any auction platform at all. But when finally looking at the concerns that ahmd issued in post #15, I pretty much consider not to give it a try at all. :(

I think the probability of getting pirated stuff on such a platform is particularly high for stuff as new as VS 2010. ;)

Ah, and... Welcome to CG! :D

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In my tests I was linking to MFC statically to avoid proving DLLs. Change to that and see the size then.

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It just so happens that I also have VS 2005 and VS 2008, so I did a comparison between the three. The conditions: Console program with MFC with static linking, no additional code to what was automatically generated. Here are the sizes of the executables:

VS 2005: Debug: 2.12 MB; Release: 184 KB
VS 2008: Debug: 1.804 MB; Release: 206 KB
VS 2010: Debug: 5.982 MB; Release: 1.584 MB

My VS 2008 is without the feature pack. It looks as if Microsoft actually did some work on the C++ (and ESPECIALLY the MFC) components of VS 2010. What did Microsoft do for C++ and MFC between VS 2005 and VS 2008?...not so much if you use the relative sizes of their dlls as a measure. About a week or so ago I was poking through the VS 2010 documentation, and I recall seeing dozens (well over a 100) of new classes in the MFC hierarchy diagram. Bearing this out is the size difference between MFC100.dll, which is 4.241 MB, and the other two MFC dlls (MFC90.dll is 1.130 MB, and MFC80.dll is 1.080 MB).

As you can see, the MFC100.dll is nearly 4x greater than the other two.

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Originally Posted by spiritualfields

What did Microsoft do for C++ and MFC between VS 2005 and VS 2008?

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It all came in VS 2008 SP1, so if you install it your code will have all that added bulk of new MFC attached to it, plus your MFC stuff won't run on anything earlier than Windows XP. So keep that in mind.

I'm more and more inclined to have VS 2008 w/o SP1 and VS 2010 installed at the same time... It just costs so much more! I bet Microsoft wanted us to do exactly that.

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I'm more and more inclined to have VS 2008 w/o SP1 and VS 2010 installed at the same time... It just costs so much more! I bet Microsoft wanted us to do exactly that.

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I ended up like that by luck because I hadn't done any real programming since around 2002 but had still kept up with the Visual Studio versions, just not installing the service packs because I wasn't programming anyway. Then about a month ago I got an idea for another program. The timing was perfect because the VS 2010 upgrade is selling for $299 on the Microsoft store online. That's a no-brainer purchase.