I just had to do this... I'm addicted to these things for some reason.

You are Iron Man

Iron Man 85% The Flash 75% Spider-Man 75% Superman 70% Wonder Woman 60% Catwoman 60% Green Lantern 60% Robin 55% Supergirl 55% Batman 50% Hulk 25%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

A post on TSS.net, triggered by a post by Jeroen van der Bos, asks whether Visual Studio should be part of Windows. I just don't think having a full development environment would be a good idea. First off, if someone wants to develop in .NET, they should know where to go. I do think the additional visibility would be good for .NET growth from a hobbyist/student perspective, but I'm just not sure it's appropriate. I admit that I first started playing with scripting languages on a Mac when I was in high school, but that's pretty much the equivalent of DOS (and now, PowerShell) batch files. A full development environment might be a little too dangerous for some. It's like scissors - sure, they're great to cut paper, but would you want to leave them sitting around so you can grab them at any time to cut paper when a small child may be running around? Or, would you want to put it somewhere where those who were capable of not hurting themselves (or others) knew how to get to them? It's a pretty simple question and very applicable to this situation.

Legality was brought up, but I don't think there would be a problem. A development environment is simply a utility to provide extra reach into the system.

Another point was brought up about how useful this would be. I have to agree that the vast majority of Windows users could really care less about doing any scripting, let alone development within the OS. Jeroen is definitely looking at this idea from a biased point of view. I won't discuss the claims, but it's just not something the community has been asking for.

All-in-all, the idea might be interesting from the perspective of someone who grew into development by playing around, but it just doesn't make sense for the Windows user-base. I will say that I would like to see the VS framework bundled with Windows. It should be an optional addition that may not even be included by default, but having it available would be nice. This way, other utilities could be built off of that framework. I see this being something like MMC, in a sense. There are tons of MMC plug-ins within Windows. Most vendors don't build off of that because of its complexities; however, if the VS framework was available, it could be utilized in a similar manner. My guess is that the framework SQL Server Management Studio is built on will probably be replacing MMC, but who knows. I haven't played with Vista, yet, tho.

I just thought this tidbit was a little entertaining... Spencer Katt always comes up with clever comics on eWeek's last page. This month's edition is no different. Spencer lets us crack a smile on Google's behalf with this strip pointing fun at all of the recent Google beta programs that seem to be popping up almost monthly for the past year.