breamore...@gmail.com wrote, on February 25, 2017 4:49 AM > > On Friday, February 24, 2017 at 1:54:39 AM UTC, Deborah Swanson wrote: > > Michael Torrie wrote, on February 23, 2017 7:43 AM > > > > > > On 2017-02-22 09:49 PM, Deborah Swanson wrote: > > > > Didn't even look. Visual Studio has always been pricey, and it > > > > never > > > > > > occurred to me that they might have a free or cheap version now. > > > > > > You can get the full edition of Visual Studio, called > Visual Studio > > > Community Edition for free. They still offer Visual > Studio Express, > > but > > > I think they recommend the full community edition to most people > > > now. > > > The biggest downside to the VS Community Edition is that it has to > > phone > > > home and log in to MS's developer web site from time to > time to stay > > > active. Sigh. MS almost gets it, but not quite. > > > > Another free version of Visual Studio, wonders never cease! > > > > As for it phoning home, I won't use it for long, and then I > might not > > ever use it again. Wonder what value they think this has, > other than > > giving them a nosecount of how many active copies there are at any > > given time. > > As an alternative to Visual Studio Community Edition, which > takes forever and a day to download and install, you might > like to give Visual Studio Code a try https://code.visualstudio.com/ > > Kindest regards. > > Mark Lawrence.
Thanks Mark, I will take a look at it. It sounds like a real pain to keep on top of all the invasions from Microsoft and who knows else, but likely that's all set up in Visual Studio Community's .NET installation code. I don't/won't have any .NET after about version 3 on my computers, so it just occurs that I may not even be able/willing to install it. Later versions of dotNet not only phone home, but can also serve as a backdoor to the NSA and other government nasties. That's one reason why they're all so keen on killing XP, because anything before SP3 can't be instrumented in that way, and a major reason why I'm sticking with XP SP2 until I can get back on Linux. And on top of that, now you say Visual Studio Community Edition takes a long time to download and install, even if you're willing to live with all that comes with it (I'm not). I almost have a verifiably working version in Python of the funcionality I want from that C library, so I may just bag Visual Studio. It would be nice to see what calculations they're exactly doing in that C library because the authors are authorities in this area, but the body of calculations is all written up in other sources. Once I have a Python version I can verify against another dataset I have and it checks with the written sources, I may not care whether I have that C library to compare to or not. But if I really want to see all the execution steps in the C code, going with Visual Studio Code is probably the way to go. Heck, I thought it would be a shortcut to download the open source C code and model my code after it, but it's turned into a rats nest of trouble, which likely won't tell me anything I don't already know at this point. Deborah -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
