

Microsoft's C# and VB Compilers Now Freely Available - rilut
http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/08/msbuildtools

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mpalme
The title is slightly misleading - In fact the compilers have been available
before as part of the .NET Framework (or Windows SDK) and are most likely
sitting on your windows machine (try
c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\csc.exe).

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drharris
Indeed, and have been free for a long, long time. The only thing they charge
money for is the IDE.

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tiernano
and even then, there are free editions of that too (express)

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JonoW
Odd title, they've always been freely available, just bundled with the larger
.Net framework

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trailfox
Wow, a programming language compiler I don't have to pay for... Somehow not
that exciting a development in 2013.

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ygra
They have been part of the .NET framework since .NET 2, anyway. The only
change now is that you can download them separately in a package with MSBuild
(which was previously only bundled with Visual Studio or the Platform SDK, if
I remember correctly).

But indeed, that's not a very big change, given that they were free before
already.

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frou_dh
Apple's similar "Command Line Tools" package is a handy way to get clang & co
installed, so that you can still use brew (...and write C) if you don't want
Xcode.

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nknighthb
This is different and somewhat confusing to me. The Command Line Tools are
just broken out from a large IDE that isn't necessary to run the results.

In this "Microsoft Build Tools" case, they're separating the tools from their
runtime support (the .NET framework). You need the framework to run whatever
you're building, so it doesn't seem like much is gained by splitting them up.

