Standard Edition Completes Visual Studio Line

The newly announced Standard Edition of Visual Studio (VS) 2005 fits between the Express tools designed to help hobbyists and beginning programmers and the more comprehensive Professional Edition for corporate developers. Unlike previous versions of VS, which had a Standard Edition for each supported programming language, a single Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition includes all of Microsoft’s languages.

VS Standard is the fourth edition of VS 2005. The editions include the following:

Express tools—Visual Basic (VB) Express, Visual C++ Express, Visual C# Express, and Visual J# Express—provide simplified development of Windows and command-line applications for beginning programmers and hobbyists who find the full VS products too daunting. Specifically, Express tools have a simplified project system that doesn’t support nesting projects inside other projects. A separate tool, Visual Web Developer Express, is limited to building ASP.NET 2.0 applications but supports all of the languages. (For more information, see “Express Tools for Beginners, Hobbyists” on page 17 of the Aug. 2004 Update.)