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Insisting on spelling it "Micro$oft" really makes you look like a relic from the past. Only people from Slashdot still do that because, well, haters gonna hate.
With that out of the way:
Just get VS Community. Everything its installer makes available for installation is free.
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Oh, I don't dislike Microsoft's products; indeed, they are the best. I just don't like the way that Microsoft makes in a PITA to get their product. Maybe I'm still thinking about how its products made me have to rebuild by system once. 
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The problem IMHO with Microsoft is that there are too many people that don't seem to know about each others projects or things like backward compatibility. So when a new version of e.g. SQL Server comes out, suddenly your code with SMO objects does not work anymore and no one seems to care about it ...
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Rather than examining the festering of old wounds in memory, why not install VS Community, and pay attention to the options offered.
Visit the 'free stuff" forum here to get some ideas about useful add-ins.
«... thank the gods that they have made you superior to those events which they have not placed within your own control, rendered you accountable for that only which is within you own control For what, then, have they made you responsible? For that which is alone in your own power—a right use of things as they appear.» Discourses of Epictetus Book I:12
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Even the "old" Microsoft was aiming to please developers; which is why there were and are free versions of the most popular IDE available.
Just install VB6, by the sound of it, it has all you will ever need 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I often read computer history and bios about people who helped start the personal pc market (Woz, Jobs, Gates, Allen).
Just reading an interesting article about SWEET16, an interpreted byte-code language created by Steve Woziak.
SWEET16 - Wikipedia[^]
Wiki says: According to Wozniak, the SWEET16 implementation is a model of frugal coding, taking up only about 300 bytes in memory.[2] SWEET16 runs at about one-tenth the speed of the equivalent native 6502 code.
*Woz also mentions this in his fantastic autobiography ( Amazon.com: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon eBook: Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith[^] )
That hit me, because doing that in 300 bytes is amazing. Well, it _was_ amazing. It was ingenious and a necessity at the time. But now, it is meaningless.
If you do something like that now, no one would really care. People would be like "big deal, I've got 8 gigs of ram in my machine."
This is how innovation changes.
It may also be why software is considered a commodity now too, even though it does amazing things and may contain strokes of genius.
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Remember when the Mac did not even come with a hard disk drive, so everything had to fit on a micro floppy.
Worked on Wang Computer with two 5.25 floppy drives if I remember, one for the software and one for the data, if I remember correctly.
Remember when a hard drive was 5 megabytes.
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Clifford Nelson wrote: Worked on Wang Computer with two 5.25 floppy drives
I wrote software for a Commodore PET where the program was stored on a cassette tape. Storing data? Yeah, if you needed to, that was done on a cassette tape too. 
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Use to put code on paper tape for programming EEPROMS. and also used computer cards.
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Ah...good ole paper tape, useful as party streamers as well...almost makes me wistful for the clackity-clack of the ASR 33 we used to punch it 
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Clifford Nelson wrote: Use to put code on paper tape for programming EEPROMS. and also used computer cards.
Oi, that's a bizarre use of paper tapes. I used paper tapes in 7-9th grade, the school had a PDP-11 with a teletype. I'd programmed a Monopoly game and saved it to punch tape, but some hole somewhere wasn't readable. 
And the community college I went to in 1980 had a CS dept that taught Fortran programming with punch cards. 
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 I still have a tape from that era with my first application - estimating the number of tiles required to cover a roof, always been a LOB developer.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I definitely remember computers (PCs) like that in the College computer lab.
Two 5.25" floppies and nothing else. Boot DOS from A:\, use other for data.
Make sure your autoexec.bat is right.
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Things I was happy for in my computing life:
My university stopped using card readers the year before I started - empty space where the machines used to be.
The introduction of double sided floppy disks - tons of space!
3 1/2" floppy disks - tons of space in less space!
The introduction of hard drives - tons of space without boxes of disks taking up space!
RAM dropping below $500/MB - tons of memory space!
I now realize I should have worked for NASA - because I seem to appreciate SPACE! 
I'm pretty sure I would not like to live in a world in which I would never be offended.
I am absolutely certain I don't want to live in a world in which you would never be offended.
Freedom doesn't mean the absence of things you don't like.
Dave
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Then you did not get to use card punches, or card sorters. Sort of sad .
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Clifford Nelson wrote: Sort of sad
Yep - not quite 'winning the lottery' kind of sad, but sad nonetheless!
I'm pretty sure I would not like to live in a world in which I would never be offended.
I am absolutely certain I don't want to live in a world in which you would never be offended.
Freedom doesn't mean the absence of things you don't like.
Dave
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raddevus wrote: That hit me, because doing that in 300 bytes is amazing. Well, it was amazing. It was ingenious and a necessity at the time. But now, it is meaningless.
Exactly. Memory was at a premium, so whatever you could do with only 300 bytes meant that you had more free memory left for whatever purposes. Nowadays, as you put it, if you've got 8 GB of RAM, you want applications to actually put it to use. No matter what decade you're from, unused memory is wasted memory.
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We booted pdp-11s by setting the front panel lever switches to the octal boot address (of something) and then hit load, run if I recall. Then a teletype went bzz bzz and you could run your diags or whatever you were after on a removable platter disc or tape drive.
Not as primitive as punch cards but still.
Those were the good old days when power supplies were linear the size of Volkswagens and the sky was the limit.
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raddevus wrote: Just reading an interesting article about SWEET16
You might want to read about "forth".
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raddevus wrote: If you do something like that now, no one would really care. People would be like "big deal, I've got 8 gigs of ram in my machine."
You might wish to consider checking-out pouet.net for the demo-scene's best productions. Likewise, a stroll around the fairway at StackExchange's Code-Golf is not the worst way to spend time.
Naturally, some would prefer to explore the world of small code in a far more literal way. Here, catch: .kkrieger (96kb openGl game with midi) - Wikipedia
Farbrausch are a bunch of nutcases, look for the demo "Debris". 
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I would make a meat pun, but ... I'd probably butcher it.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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That would be the unkindest cut of all.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I'd steak my life on it!
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
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#meatoo
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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