News

Windows 8 Development Kit for Mac Sells Out in a Half-Hour

The USB stick contained a copy of Windows 8 and Parallels Desktop 8, for a small donation to charity.

If you blinked, you missed your chance to get a cheap Windows 8 development starter kit for the Mac platform.

Microsoft today offered (nearly) free Windows 8 USB sticks to Mac developers but apparently "sold out" just over 30 minutes after the offer was posted.

A blog posted at 10:12 a.m. today offered a Windows QuickStart Kit for Mac developers, including a copy of Windows 8 and Parallels Desktop 8, on a USB stick, in return for a $25 donation to a select charity.

At 10:45 a.m., the blog was updated:

The Windows Quickstart offer sold out quickly. Given how popular these were, we will look into making other offers available in the near future.

The offer was made "courtesy of our friends at Swish," Microsoft said, as part of promotions for the new Microsoft site, modern.IE, described as "a new set of tools to help you support modern and older versions of Internet Explorer."

The Windows 8 offer included a full Windows 8 Pro license, Parallels for Desktop 8 for Mac and labs for porting iOS and UX to Windows. The download site said users would be required to prove they were developers, apparently by writing some fairly simple code.

Besides the Windows 8 QuickStart offer, the blog post also said other goodies were available, such as new virtual machines for IE10 on Windows 7 and IE8 on Windows XP, and three months of access to BrowserStack, where sites can be tested across browsers.

Some readers weren't too happy with the brief duration of the offer. One said, "that deal for the QuickStart kit went fast... must have been like 10 of them available or something :( I hope you guys will release more, obviously the demand is high."

Another wrote, "Sold out before I even knew this existed.. nice job."

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Windows Community Toolkit v8.2 Adds Native AOT Support

    Microsoft shipped Windows Community Toolkit v8.2, an incremental update to the open-source collection of helper functions and other resources designed to simplify the development of Windows applications. The main new feature is support for native ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.

  • New 'Visual Studio Hub' 1-Stop-Shop for GitHub Copilot Resources, More

    Unsurprisingly, GitHub Copilot resources are front-and-center in Microsoft's new Visual Studio Hub, a one-stop-shop for all things concerning your favorite IDE.

  • Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

    At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.

  • Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.

  • Low-Code Report Says AI Will Enhance, Not Replace DIY Dev Tools

    Along with replacing software developers and possibly killing humanity, advanced AI is seen by many as a death knell for the do-it-yourself, low-code/no-code tooling industry, but a new report belies that notion.

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube