Memoirs of a Developer

Visual Studio.Net has been Microsoft’s flag ship development suite since 2002. Toward the end of last year we saw the advent of their latest release.

As is Microsoft’s latest trend, they released three flavors (Visual Studio Express Editions , Visual Studio Standard Edition, Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2005 Team System) each one more expensive than the other and builds on its predecessor’s feature pack.

The most controversial of these packages is the Express Edition of Visual Studio. The Express Editions can be regarded as the most basic of the collection of packages and has been trimmed down to a level which can be considered to be just barely acceptable.

Over the last couple of month I have been developing some very simple applications. Throughout this development cycle being used to developing on the professional edition i felt a number of constraints which were hard to get used to:

• The first major constraint is that developing varied components you would end up needing copies of all of the express studio flavours, thus focing the developer to keep jumping between one studio to the next just to develop a simple applicaiton and a client to test it.
• This point leads us to the second constraint which is the lack of flexibility in the solution. The major draw back of this design is that you can only load up to one project into a solution which makes even small projects harder to manage and much more difficult to implement technologies like .Net Remoting which usually need a set of separate projects.
• Most code on the web was developed using the Visual Studio Standard Edition which means that anyone who is at home using the Express Editions will have to try extract the desired code and try to recreate a new solution for it. This is sometimes easy but more often then not it proves to be impossible a task