Finally! I can talk!
Today at Tech Ed Europe in Amsterdam Microsoft pulled open the kimono.
The new Express family of development tools (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/) are live in beta format. This includes Visual Basic, C#, C++, J#, and Web developer editions.
These new “value” priced editions of the Visual Studio family lower the barriar to entry. You get real development enviroments—IntelliSense, Edit & Continue, Visual Data Tools, Smart Tags, etc.—just like in the full-blown products. Pricing has not been announced, but Microsoft says they will be very affordable.
But wait, there’s more. There’s also SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. This is the replacement for MSDE 2000. It will be free as before.
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (SSE) has some great new changes:
- Support for XCopy style deployment
- No workload governor
- Support for databases up to 4Gb in size
- Support for up to 50 instances
- Only supports 1 processor
- Only supports 512 Mb of RAM
I’ve got two articles about SSE and VB Express coming out real soon with more details (one should be on the web today, the other is in MSDN Magazine (September edition I think).
More to come.
End of line.