Express Tools for Beginners, Hobbyists

With new “Express” editions of its popular Visual Studio developer tools, Microsoft hopes to overcome three limitations that have made Visual Studio difficult for entry-level and hobbyist programmers: price, size, and complexity. In addition, an Express edition of SQL Server 2005 improves on the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) by offering better management tools along with the same basic feature set as SQL Server 2005.

Express Languages Simplify IDE

Microsoft has long offered inexpensive (about US$100) Standard editions of its popular developer tools, including Visual Basic (VB), Visual C++, and C#, but these have been little more than stripped-down versions of the Professional editions, with just enough features removed to prevent them from cannibalizing sales of the higher-priced Professional and Enterprise editions. Standard edition products were not tailored in any way to help beginning or hobbyist developers, many of whom were overwhelmed by the scope and complexity of the Standard editions. Because the Standard edition tools were so ill-suited for casual developers and were far too large for downloading, the ASP.NET team even went so far as to build its own free tool, ASP.NET Web Matrix, in an effort to make ASP.NET more approachable. (For more information on Web Matrix, see “Web Matrix Makes ASP.NET More Accessible” on page 21 of the Aug. 2002 Update.)