Tuesday, September 9, 2008


Traditionally, Microsoft don't have a reputation for giving away free software. More recently however, Microsoft have produced free Express versions of their Visual Studio programming IDE.

The Express versions are cutdown versions of the full Visual Studio packages. In the Express versions some features have been scaled back, e.g. debugging and refactoring capabilities. However, the Express software still remain extremely useful for the casual software developer, especially those looking for a low cost way of learning about software development.
Visual C# 2008 Express edition has added support for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) as well as development of applications using Microsoft's SQL Server database technology.
Support for web-based applications has also been enhanced with the addition of C4F (Coding4Fun) developer toolkits as well as the Facebook Developer Toolkit. Even though Visual Studio Express ships with a cutdown version of the MSDN document, the full documentation can still be accessed online.