Tuesday, March 18, 2008

I Love Free Stuff

I'm share Royals season tickets with a group of folks. A friend of ours buys the entire season, and then we get together and have a ticket draft to divvy them up.

This draft has always been a rather manual, tedious task. This year, I decided to try to automate it. To build a program to manage the draft, I downloaded Microsoft's Visual Basic Express.

Visual Basic Express is one of several free (yes, FREE!) Visual Studio products that Microsoft offers.

I used VB Express to build a simple draft management program. It was easy, and dare I say, fun. I was a .NET developer for a lot of years, and I must say that this VB Express works almost identical to the full blown Visual Studio product. It's a great way to allow hobbyists (or poor guys like me) to do development in a world class development tool for free.

Also available is C#, C++, and a web development tool. SQL Server 2005 Express is also available if you want a back end database for your application.

These Express tools are great! Get 'em here: Express Site

No comments: