For those of you who don’t know about them, Microsoft have free cut-down versions of several of the Visual Studio languages available to download.
The three main languages are available – Visual Basic Express Edition, Visual C# Express Edition, Visual C++ Express Edition. Also, for developing ASP.NET Websites and Web Services, there is Visual Web Developer Express Edition.
I find that when I am working on an ASP.NET website with some other people, whether they are designers, or just people writing/altering text, it is much easier for me if everyone uses Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express.
The main disadvantage of the Express editions as far as I’m concerned is that they don’t work with source control integration. That doesn’t affect individual developers, but when you are working as part of a team, it makes life difficult, especially for non-web based systems. For web based systems, as long as you are careful, it is usually ok, and Visual Studio will normally warn you if you try to save over something that someone else has changed, at least if you are using FrontPage Extensions to access the site.
Extensibility is also not supported in the Express editions, so if you need any extensions or add-ins to Visual Studio, they won’t work.
There are a number of other differences. Microsoft have a full feature comparison on their site.
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Tags: .NET, Coding, CSS, HTML, Visual Studio
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