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When Visual Studio 2005 was launched, so were the “light duty” Visual Studio Express Editions which were made available free for one year as an enticement to their intended “Web hosting, hobbyist and enthusiast” market. Today, Microsoft took the logical next step and made them free permanently (press release), nominally based on requests from the rapidly growing community of users. Frankly, the original “free for one year plan” was so odd, one wonders if it weren’t just a ploy to get early adoption.
In any case, the Express editions (Visual Web Developer Express, Visual Basic Express, Visual C# Express, Visual C++ Express and Visual J# Express) are plenty capable and now join the already free SQL Server Express Edition. Examples of partner support are also featured in the press release. All of this is a loss leader for Microsoft, of course, with the intent of attracting more developers to the .NET platform.
You can download the Express editions here.
April 20th, 2006 at 3:50 PM
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August 14th, 2006 at 9:51 AM
[...] I must confess to having developed some “hobbyist” games in the past, but that was in a much simpler time and that’s the likely problem here. The reason that modern games are developed by teams with massive budgets is that the standards are quite high and you need a team of specialists to handle all the aspects. That being said, there’s no reason that an individual or small group couldn’t successfully develop a so-called “casual game” and this is a good way to pull them on to the Microsoft platforms. Of course, this is the same approach as the free Visual Studio Express editions for regular programming. Filed under Xbox, Tools, PC Games, General Business, XNA, Public Relations, Marketing, Microsoft [Permalink] [...]