Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions. We have considered making per-use trial, but that would mean that VisualGDB would have to re-activate on each start and that would make it much more inconvenient. If you did not have enough time to try out VisualGDB, you can always contact our support, explain your situation and we will give you a trial extension.

Regarding the academic pricing, most of the VisualGDB price comes from the support we provide with the product. For a complex IDE plugin like VisualGDB there are much more things that can go wrong compared to a JTAG debugger, so we need to reflect this in the license price and terms in order to be able to provide support. We could offer an academic license with no technical support, however that would unfortunately upset the academic users, as they would still sometimes need help resolving occasional issues just like regular users.

Hence the only advice we can give if you find VisualGDB too expensive is to try free tools like Eclipse. Our toolchains will still work with them, although the integration won’t be seamless and you would not be covered by our technical support, but you will still get the basic debug functionality that may be sufficient if you don’t use them regularly.