
"A few weeks ago, we shared our plans for the Express editions of Visual Studio 2012. As we've worked to deliver the best experience with Visual Studio for our platforms with Windows 8, Windows Phone, and for Web and Windows Azure, we heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level. Today, I'm
happy to announce that we will add Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop to the Visual Studio 2012 family. This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we've made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications."
Member since:
2006-07-04
I agree with this decision, but note that Microsoft was going to keep VS2010 Express available and supported anyway, and hobbyists could use those to target pre-Windows 8 OS.
VS11 Express does have the advantage that the languages are merged into one package. VS2010 Express separated C#, VB, and C++ whereas they all come in the same SKU with VS11 Express (though still it looks like there'll be separate Express SKUs for targetting Metro and Desktop (and Web, but that was already separate in VS2010 Express).