Noah Coad: An Overview of Visual Studio Express 2010

I believe Microsoft is really missing or deliberately ignoring the way the community thinks about Express. For the community VS Express is not only the version you use to try out Visual Studio but also the only free version of Visual Studio. In many cases Express is the version that competes with other product like Eclipse which are free. Express is what I use for my pet projects at home and I do not qualify for Dreamspark or Bizspark and I believe this is the case with many devs. I believe with IntelliJ IDEA introducing a free version there is no popular IDE that doesn't have production ready free version except Visual Studio.

And in the light of all that - two words: Unit Testing?!?!?!

I don't see the serious limitation here, the only thing you lose is the ability to use Microsoft's testing framework.  Which is not really a big deal, you can still use any of the many, many, many open source unit testing frameworks such as Moq.  If you pair that with TDD.Net which I am sure will be updated for VS2010 if it doesn't already work and you have yourself a nice system.  Personally I haven't really worked with 2010 testing framework but if it's anything like 2008 where it takes forever to start up, or if it puts the unit tests in those hierarchy of folders which makes it difficult to test with filesystem dependencies due to relative pathing issues then I will stick with my open source toolset.  Although using TDD.NET with the Microsoft testing framework does work great and is very quick...

So basically you are saying that I'm right but I can use non-MS products to work around the fact that MS has not included unit testing with Express?

Is something different with the encoding of this video? When I launch it, my CPU gets 100% of usage and the video is unwatchable. All other videos from C9 work fine.

Hi,

I'm not really that obsessed that I have noteworthy home-pet-projects (I indeed like those hours I don't have to spend coding )  but I've you've got an MSDN subs. then you could use just those tools anyway (wouldn't you?) - so I don't see the point.

I personally don't have an MSDN subscription but the company I work for has. But then there are all these people whose daytime job is lets say Java and they are interested in .NET. It's not about me (although I do use Express at home) it's about having a free version of Visual Studio because everyone else has free version and frankly VS Express is not good enough to compete with other free versions. No matter what and how many programs MS has like Dreamspark to most devs out there it is as simple as "what is the free version of VS". And right now the answer is Express. Nobody wants to read licenses and eligibility and all that legal crap. People just want to download the free stuff like they do with every other IDE product. They don't want to talk to the school administrator and ask him to enlist the school in the program. They don't want to use the company MSDN subscription (I don't). No matter who MS is targeting Express at the end result is that it is the free version of VS.