Just one day ago Visual Studio 2010 RTM has been officially released in some priced editions and some free editions. Free editions are named Express editions and is provided as 4 separate editions: Visual Web Developer, Visual Basic, Visual C# and Visual C++.
Express editions have limitations. But this not means that you could not use them professionally. If you are going to use these Expression editions just as I’m going to do, I have 3 ways to power up Express editions:
1. Express editions does not allow any source code management add-on integration. For example you can not use AnkhSVN, and IDE integration for Subversion, with Express editions. As a work-around you can do your source code managements outside of Visual Studio using tools like TortoiseSVN or Git Bash.
2. Express editions has not support of MS Test projects. Don’t worry, you can still do testing by use of open source NUnit instead. It has full functionality and can be performed outside of Visual Studio.
3. With one specific Express edition you can only create projects of that type and not other project types. For example with Visual C# Express you can create C# project libraries but you can not create ASP.NET website projects. To solve this problem you can just install 2 Visual Studio Express editions simultaneously. So with which one you can create/open your desired project type.
Comments
Unfortunately microsoft need to wake up and smell the coffee on this one.
It would be much simpler for them and encourage more people to use the .net platform if they simply changed the Eula to say that you cannot ship programs with a non commercial licence and then give professional away as a free tool, this has been done before by other companies.
Anyone who is a professional developer but who does not have pots of cash sitting about is not easily able to afford a version of visual studio that reflects the full feature set of the new release.
This means less capable people about.
I understand tool development is very expensive but people learning the technology at home are being hampered by these express editions.
Surely there is a better way to restrict the build output of these products to mark generated assemblies as having come from a non commercial licence.