Going through College when I wanted to do some programming at home I either had to do straight notepad and compiler playing or use what felt like a homegrown Development environment called Bloodshed. Times has changed and Bloodshed has gotten cleaned up but more importantly the industry standard, Microsoft Visual Studio now has a free “Express Editions“. Not exactly sure when they started releasing these, but I just ran acrossed this the other day. And found this is perfect for the fooling around and doing light programming (verses writing a new Office Suite of something). They have versions for Visual Basic, C#, C++, J#/Java (not sure if I’d trust this to be 100% compatible), and Microsoft SQL Server. This has the raved about MSDN code and knowledge base frontend built in, and the industry standard programming interface.
Tags: DIY, Programming, Windows
The new Express editions are geared toward hobbyists and non-professional programmers, students, and non-DBA IT folks. There’s also a large push to build up web dev with SQL Server Express backend with full integration into the new Visual Web Developer Express.
Personally, I’m more interested in seeing how SQL Server Express will compete with MySQL in the future.
And free is always good!
Well since MySQL has matured as a database… I still wonder if even with M$ removeing some from it’s SQL to make it Express… i fit’ll be about the same or if you will have the backup and such abilities that are lacking in MySQL.
As for the missing features, I plan to put my hand and help with some game programming with DirectX… now the main guys will be using the full versions of Studio… But it looks like there are some tutorials on how to work with DirectX in Express… so they may allow some libraries… i wonder if you can connect outside Libraries/SDKs besides DirectX.
You can integrate any other COM or .NET API. Simply add a project, right click and choose “Add reference…”
What *isn’t* enabled is extending Visual Studio, either through macros, add-ins, or VSIP packages.