Microsoft is making Express editions of the 2005 versions of SQL Server, VB.NET, C# .NET and C++ .NET freely available:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/
That’s right; no cost. There’s even a new product in the Visual Studio family called Visual Web Developer. Perhaps it’s a resurection of InterDev? Meh. But still…free! The reasons behind this are obvious, but they’re damn-fine reasons from their perspective. Put the tools in the hands of the developers for no-cost and they’ll use them. It works for the open-source community. I’ve played around with the 2005 versions of C# and VB.NET and I think they’re a huge improvement over Visual Studio .NET 2003.
I also installed SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. An absolute must to accompany this should be SQL Server Management Studio Express – again, free. This allows you to administer databases with a GUI, instead of from a command line.
My favourtite part about all of this is that .NET 2005 can coexist with other versions. I also have Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 (I skipped 2002 ’cause I was poor) installed and all is well. And having .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 installed together poses no problems at all – it was designed that way.
I know…all the anti-Microsoft fanboys will post nasty comments. Yes, IE still sucks. But the one thing that they do properly is cater to developers.
PS: If you’re running Windows, don’t open any WMF files anytime soon 😉 Just use Firefox or Opera and avoid WMF files or else this will happen to you 😐 Here’s some background on the WMF flaw that affects every version of Windows since v3.0 (circa 1990).
