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Microsoft announced a number of new development products today.
These include:
- Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
- Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
- Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
- Visual J# 2005 Express Edition
- Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
Microsoft described these as “lightweight” software development
tools. In talking with the product managers last month, they told
me that these were being aimed at the ‘non traditional’ people
doing programmers. These are aimed at hobbyists, students, and
non-developers who are writing programs. As such, there is an
expectation that these people don’t need the advanced features
and don’t need the extra clutter that traditional programmers
do need. When you look at these tools, you will see that they
are simplified versions of Visual Studio. Many of the menu items,
dialogs, and settings that are in the standard Visual Studio
product won’t be found in these products.
These tools are also more focused towards platforms. The Visual Web
Developmer Express Edition can be used for creating ASP 2.0
applications using C#, VB, or J#. The other four tools are
focused on Windows development and thus don’t do ASP. All
of the tools use the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework. For
more information, you can check out my overview article that
will be posted to CodeGuru today. I’ll also be posting a
second article that is a very basic overview of what it took
to install and create an application with the Visual C# Express
Edition beta.
In addition to announcing these products, Microsoft is also
releasing betas. You can get to them from links on the
following page:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/
Be aware: These are betas. I asked about issues installing
these with previous versions of Visual Studio (2002 and 2003).
It was indicated to me that you may not want to do that. As
with any beta products, use them at your own risk! On the
positive side, one of the features of these products is that
they are small and thus relatively easy to download.
CodeGuru article: Simplified Development Tools —The Microsoft Express Products
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