Important Changes to Express Editions of Visual Studio "11"

Note: The source of this is the Visual Studio “11” beta Product Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=243994) so this may change by release.

Today we have five Express products: C++, C#, Visual Basic, Web and Phone however with the launch of Visual Studio “11” we will only have TWO!

These two editions of Express we will have are Web & Windows. I do not believe we will only ever have two editions, as the 2010 Express editions grew during the product so I would expect a few new ones coming along post launch.

So how does the old Express editions map to the new Express editions?

• C++ maps to NOTHING
• C# for WinForm/WPF/Silverlight maps to NOTHING
• VB for WinForm/WPF/Silverlight maps to NOTHING
• Phone maps to NOTHING
• Web maps to Web

Let me reiterate this, if you want to build non-Metro applications (unless they are web) there is NO Express edition anymore for this! The Windows Express edition ONLY allows the building of Metro apps (including ARM). Web dev using Express editions still continue to work as before.

Both Express editions have a new enhancements too, which is a fantastic thing: The ability Version Control & Work Item Tracking with TFS is included out of the box.

For the Windows express edition it has even more enhancements

• A subset of static analysis (fxCop) for helping developers pass Win Store evaluation
• Performance Profiling has been added: CPU Sampling for C#/VB/C++ Metro apps and Instrumentation for HTML/JS Metro Apps