QUESTION FOR CODERS - WHAT SOFTWARE WOULD YOU LIKE TO WIN?

[mouser]

We will probably be contacting more companies to see if they might be willing to donate some programmer tools as prizes for coders who participate in coding snack projects.  It's always a long shot but i thought we might as well ask you guys+gals if you have any particular software (programming related) that you'd like us to offer as a prize.

Ideally it would be a tool that you could use in a coding snack to make some freeware.

[Veign]

Visual Studio 2005 from Microsoft...

Funny thing is most *tools* for developers can be found as Open Source or freeware.  The only tools that are not typically free is the base development platform..

One thing that may be nice is to get some of the ActiveX / COM / .Net components.  The good ones are not typically free and really help creating powerful applications.

Just because its a coding snack doesn't mean it can't be as good as shareware / commercial software.....

[mouser]

i am very interested in expanding donationcoder.com to do a lot of reviews of components (activex,dll,delphi), and i think it would be a great opportunity to try to bring some discounts and component prizes to coding snack authors.

[Veign]

I think that is the area alot of freeware developers lack.  These components can be so expensive and often just not used.  Good luck and looking forward to see what you can bring into these forums...

[mouser]

i've said this before but it bares repeating - if you are a poor freeware developer (esp. if you are a student), WRITE TO THE COMPANIES SELLING THESE COMPONENTS!!!

explain your situation, that you simply could not afford to pay the price they are asking.
tell them you will be using the component for freeware or donationware.

you would probably be very surprised at how many companies and authors will let you use the components for free or for a huge discount.
and if they won't - maybe that's not a company you want to be supporting with your money anyway.

just my 2 cents.

[Carol Haynes]

Actually most of the top companies do good deals for students. If you want Visual Studio MS certainly used to provide Visual Studio Pro for less than $100 (I bought Visual Studio 6 that way) and they tend to class anyone who knows a student these days (including school kids) as eligible for educational licenses.

Borland have always been quite generous - at one time they were giving Delphi PE away for free!

[Veign]

Problem with student discounts is you either have to be a student or have a student living in your household - neither of which fits me...

Not so worried about MS products as I have an MSDN subscription which gets me a copy of most MS software for use in a development / testing environment. 

The costs for me are the components that I just can't justify on a freeware applications.  Add that to all the other costs and developing freeware applications is an expensive hobby (considering the time I put in)....

[Carol Haynes]

How realistic would it be to produce collaborative components though a site like this, and then offer them as donationware ?

I know it is time consuming to do this sort of thing but I'm sure it would generate a lot of interest ...

[mouser]

well people write freeware/opensource components all the time - it's no different from writing any other kind of software.
so there's nothing special about it really.
which reminds me, i'm supposed to release my license key components.. so much to do so little time..

[Veign]

The problem I have found with the freeware versions is that they are buggy and the priority to resolve issues is not so high. 

Take a company like ComponentOne where this is all they do and what they profit from.  Resolving issues, working on new versions, adding features is required to make money - very good incentive if you ask me.

The worst thing that could happen is to release a piece of software with a bug in a component that is not yours.  Then struggle to get it fixed.

I try and stay away from 3rd party controls as much as possible but there are times when using one would add so much to the application and reduce my development time by weeks / months....

[mouser]

whether commercial or freeware, it is always a gamble using a component -
inevitably there are issues that come up, some worse than others, that are in the realm of the component, and it can be scary to find yourself trying to debug a problem in the component and not being sure whose fault it is, nor understanding the code completely.  especially if you don't have the source code..  sometimes its a win, sometimes a loss, it's hard to know ahead of time..