Microsoft has opened public betas for the upcoming Express edition of its Visual Studio product line as well as SQL Server. The products include “Visual Basic 2005 Express”, “Visual C# 2005 Express”, “Visual C++ 2005 Express”, “Visual J# 2005 Express”, “SQL Server 2005 Express” and an interesting “Visual Web Dev 2005 Express” for developing ASP.NET content in Visual Basic, C# or J#. The expected retail pricing for these products is $49-$99.
Interesting that you mention a price…
According to MS, and I quote from the FAQ:
“We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year. For the time being, we can tell you that the Express Editions will be low-cost and will continue to be easy to acquire.”
You can buy the “standard” of VB .NET 2003 from amazon for $91.99, C# for $91.99, and C++ for $89.99
I wonder if there is a difference between express and standard or if it is just a name change.
For the life of me I can’t find where I saw that $49-99 price figure. It was in one of the news stories and happened to be the first one I read.
And this is not the same as the Visual Studio xx software packages. Those are the full blown programs with all the bells and whistles. VSE is small (30MB is pretty good when you compare it to regular VS) and not as full featured as the tools now selling for ~$100. It’s not too hard to figure VSE will be in the $50 area, and possibly even less with educational pricing.
I tried installing this at work but the install dies out when trying to download the .NET 2.0 Beta. Anyone know if there is a full installer available?
IBM launched their Express products (Domino, DB2) about 8 months ago, and now MS are coming out with the same. AFAIR the IBM lineup was all server offerings.
Is someone know if we can override subs and function in vb express 2005 ?
What are the missing stuff in this release compared to vb.net 2003
Someone download this and give me a review !!!!!
VB.net ,c#, c++ reviews !
I’m not sure about the other products (no Passport account), but the SQL Server 2005 Express product is definitely free-as-in-beer. This is an update to the previous MSDE 2000 product (also free) based on the new 2005 engine.
I’ve found MSDE to be quite useful, especially as a more stable drop-in replacement engine for Access. Note that MSDE only accepts client connections from the same computer the server is running on – I have no idea if that is also true of 2005 Express, but it seems likely.
SQL Server 2005 Express is free (no charge). It is an update of the existing MSDE version of SQL Server 2000, updated to the 2005 engine. MSDE is also a free download.
I’ve found MSDE to be extremely helpful, especially as a drop-in replacement database engine for MS Access. MSDE is a version of SQL Server that only accepts client connections from the same computer the server is running on – I assume 2005 Express will have the same restriction. MSDE is also a single-processor version of the server – although it will run on multi-processor systems it will only use one processor; 2005 Express is single-processor too.
Someone download this and give me a review !!!!!
Heh, I can just see it now – an OSNews contributor reviews Visual Studio:
Page 1: Detailed description (inc. screenshots) of the registration and download process.
Page 2: Detailed description (inc. screenshots) of the installation wizard.
Page 3: Some screenshots and a critique of the UI.
Page 4: A paragraph describing how to compile and run “Hello, world”.
Here’s my brief review. I downloaded the C++ one.
The best I can say for this product is that it is definitely a beta. I have no tremendous interest in the managed extensions for C++ and that seems to be mostly what this is about. Apparently they changed the C++ interface to the CLI and now supposedly it’s better. So I’ll talk about each portion of the new program.
Interface: Horrible. It’s basically the same as VS.Net 2003, only it has the really ugly toolbars that Office 2003 has, and has been made slower. I’m sure the slowness will improve with the final release. It was interesting how it was slow the first time you used a feature and it sped up as you used them again and again. This said, interface prettiness doesn’t really matter for a developer tool.
C++ Managed Extensions: They seem to be an ok thing. The interface is no less clunky than it was before, but supposedly it allows some better, more natural coding techniques for C++ developers. What I don’t like is that they didn’t stick to the C++ language. It might as well be C# because they changed the language so much. Tons of keywords are added. Keywords are added that just don’t have a place in C++ (such as the new abstract keyword) because there is real C++ synax for them.
GUI Builder: It’s a traditional MS GUI builder. It doesn’t offer layout managers or any of the modern features used for GUI building. (It does have something that I thought was a layout manager, but the GUI builder didn’t respect it when I placed objects in it. I suspect there needs to be code written to make the objects bind to it and make it bind to the window.) Not really a fan of the GUI Builder. I created a box and accidentally double clicked on an object an it added code to handle an event, but when I removed the code it didn’t figure that out and remove the automatically generated code, so I had to go modify that myself to get it to build.
Traditional windows development: Offers appwizards for ATL (not MFC really, oddly, unless it is a console app) and plain C windows programs. These however do not generate code that can compile, because there is no windows.h file. Yes, there is no windows.h file. I find this really stupid.
Console programs: Work just fine. Seems to have the C and the C++ standard libraries and they work. (I wrote Hello World cause it was quick and I did some system calls and stuff and it did just fine).
Editor: It is pretty much the standard VS.Net 2003 editor. It supports some more things than the basic VS.Net editor, but at first glance they didn’t seem to be a really big deal. It is a nice editor though. I do like the code completion and intellisense and code browsing. I find it very efficient. This is really the redeeming feature of the environment.
Install: 30MB ha. 50MB ha. It was closer to 200MB because I needed the new framework and I wanted the basic MSDN library (so help would work). This isn’t really a problem, it just contradicts their marketting so it bothered me a little bit.
That’s about it. I think I’m going to delete it, but I might well just be too lazy now. I really doubt I’ll use it.
Here:
http://lightforms.sourceforge.net/temp/vcexpress.PNG
I have installed Visual C++ Express and it’s really cool! I have successfully compiled my Win32 GUI project, just needed to install the Platform SDK too (Visual C++ Express doesn’t have windows headers and libs bundled). It imports Visual C++ 2003 projects perfectly. The IDE looks so nice, the GUI editor is very cool. Definetly it made my night happier! 🙂
Best regards,
Cesar
Looks just like Dev c++ .