Dan Fernandez, the lead project manager for Visual Studio Express, says that VSE 2005 will now be free. You can get it here.

We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!

Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free.

The key reason for the pricing change was you. You've helped make Visual Studio Express a runaway hit, and we're proud to announce that in the five months since its launch, Express has been downloaded over 5 million times!

miglaugh> This is pretty cool. Any idea what features aren't enabled unless you buy the professional version? Or is it one of those licensing gigs where you can only use it for personal purposes? Like they'd be able to find out. I assume there is no limit on what you can code.


http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/yukon_visualstudio2005.asp

quote:

So what are the limitations of the Express Editions, you ask? You can't access remote data; these versions use only a locally installed data source (including the free SQL Server 2005 Express Edition). There are no mobile device development features in VB Express, Visual C# Express, or Visual C++ Express; you must upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition to get those features. And all the high-end features from the Visual Studio Team System editions (see below) are missing, of course, including application and code modeling, unit testing, static code analysis, and the like.


BTW: I still prefer Delphi (v7.0) for GUI development on Windows.

This is pretty cool. Any idea what features aren't enabled unless you buy the professional version? Or is it one of those licensing gigs where you can only use it for personal purposes? Like they'd be able to find out. I assume there is no limit on what you can code.

But ofcoarse they give it away free just when I'm about to switch from a windows only job to a unix one. ahh well.