Visual Studio…the best edition

Although it’s been put on the back burner many times over the last few months years,I’ve committed myself to learning .Net. After talking with quite a few people,I decided that C# would be my best bet.

So I bought myself a book and compiled a list of online resources. The next step would be the IDE. Visual Studio is anywhere between $500 and $2500 depending on the version. Ouch.

I don’t remember how but luckily I stumbled upon the Express area of Microsoft’s web site. As the name suggests,they offer Express (read free) versions of quite a few of Microsoft’s development products such as Visual Studio and SQL Server to name a few. While I’m not sure about SQL Server,the drawback of Visual Studio Express is that only one programming language is supported per version. I’m sure it’s short on other features as well but that seems to be the main difference. There isn’t anything preventing someone from downloading an Express edition for each of the programming languages they develop in but I imagine they’d quickly tire of switching back and forth and pony up for the commercial version which supports all of them under one IDE.

An added bonus (in addition to the free part) is that registering the product grants the developer access to another area of Microsoft’s site where you can download two dozen or so free icons from IconBuffet,about 250 royalty-free images from Corbis,and development related ebooks. Not a bad deal.

I imagine that as I get more into developing in C#,I’ll spend the big bucks for the commercial product. Until then,I intend to post here about my development progress and what I think about Visual C# Express.

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