Are Visual Studio Express products really only for "hobbyists, students and novices"?_问答_开发者

I have used Visual Studio Professional 2008, and have been testing the free C# Express 2010 version recently. In general I'm amazed at how good it is for free, and how many of the full VS features it has. I'm thinking of using it for a commercial program and I know the license allows for that, it's just the description of it being for "non-professional developers like hobbyists, students and novice developers" concerns me a bit.

What I'm interested 开发者_开发技巧in knowing is what is stopping it being 'professional', that is:

Have you evaluated the express edition, and found a specific useful feature lacking that stopped you from using it ? Or did you initially use the express versions, but upgraded to full VS because of a feature lacking ? If so, what was that feature ?

I've searched for similar questions and found lists of differences between the full VS and express versions, but I'm more interested in knowing peoples personal experiences with it. It seems like many of the extra features in VS target developers working in large teams, so I'm mainly interested in hearing from either solo or small team developers where it seems like there's less compelling reasons to upgrade.

The limitations I've personally encountered are:

Extensions not being supported, though I can still use DotTrace, NUnit and an obfuscator outside of the VS integration, albeit it's a bit less convenient.
Limited refactoring, although the "Rename" and "Extract Method" are still there and I think they're the most useful. Edit: Not having 'Encapsulate Field' in Express used to be annoying though, though the introduction of automatic getters and setters has pretty much canceled that out I think.
More limited debugging for multi-threaded apps.
Edit: Another is that you can't easily switch between targeting "Any CPU/x86/x64" in Express like you can in VS. It is possible, but needs manually editing your project file to do so.

But the pluses seem to outweigh the minuses so far. Is there anything you found was a deal-breaker for you ?

Update: To come back to this a couple of months later, and after releasing a product built with the Express version, it is indeed possible to program professionally with the Express versions. The limitations within the program itself are pretty minor and can be worked around, but I've increasingly come to realise it's really the "extensions not supported" one that's the (only) major drawback. No Resharper, CodeRush or the like, and no source control, profiling, database explorer or unit testing and the like within VS itself. It's more of a productivity drag than a deal breaker, but it is annoying to come across a cool looking VS extension only to see that "Not supported in Express versions" notice.

If anyone else is in the same situation, I'd evaluate the extensions you use (or might be planning to use) first and see how important they are to you. Express is fine if you don't use any extensions or could live without them without a significant drop in productivity, otherwise stick with the Professional version.

I've used express for 5 years, it has everything you need to produce professional projects. There's one important feature that's missing, which is the extensible Database Explorer, e.g. if you need to generate an Entity Framework model from a MySQL database. But for that I use Visual Studio Shell (also free). For other stuff such as unit testing and source control I use other tools. You really don't need Visual Studio to have everything you need to manage a software project.

No add-ins => No ReSharper => No dice.

The biggest problem with the Express version is you don't have any source control. You can't professionally work without it, even if you are a lone freelancer. Keeping a change history on a project is vital when you mess something up and want to go to a previous version or simply want to compare different revisions.

Also I think in Express you can't have web and desktop applications in the same solution, or do other types of combination of projects. I'm not really sure about this one, because I don't use Express (for the first reason :))

Other answers have covert the fact that it can very well be enough, but if you are more than a hobbyists, students or novices, just get enrolled into the Microsoft BizSpark program.
You get all the tools for free (Visual Studio Ultimate, Team Foundation Server, All Windows Versions etc.) and you don't even need to be a company. Enrollment is super easy and uncomplicated.

The only requirements are (taken from the homepage):

You develop software

Privately held

Less than 3 years in business

< 1mio $ per year

This is not an ad. We have been very happy with the program and got access to everything we needed. Just wanted to let people know it existed.

Additional info:

You can be member of this program for 3 years
When you leave the program you have to pay a 200$ fee, its made for startups afterall

I had been using VS Express for several years but I recently upgraded to VS Ultimate. There is nothing that you cannot do in Express, but the integration of features in the full product makes everything more convenient.

When you have source control, unit tests, performance/code analysis, installers all in the same solution, it saves a lot of time and hassle jumping between different programs. Also one big issue for me was not being able to mix features that are spread across the different Express editions, such as mixing ASP.NET with WinForms, or even VB.NET with C#.

I got a lot of use out of Express, it's a great product, but I was very happy the day I got to uninstall ten programs and replace them with one.

The pros:

Absolutely free
Has enought functinality for you to develop commercial products (you know the saying: you need 20% of anything to get 80% done). I developed and deployed a wp7 (windows phone 7) app with the express edition and it was a pleasant experience.

The cons:

No integration with source control. I use svn for my projects and i have to use tortoise svn outside of vs to manage the code. Its a minor annoyance, not a deal breaker.
Can't develop web/desktop/mobile in the same solution. Its easier to have them all in the same project when you have a common dll for your business logic. Unfortunately with express edition you will end up using copy/paste for moving dlls that are common between projects. Again it's a minor annoyance, not a deal breaker.

Professional is not the big step up here - Ultimate is. VS2010 Ultimate, for example, comes with bunches of profilers and that kind of thing. They give Professional away to any old student, for example.

There's only one plus: the cost. Every other difference is a minus (or at best reduces the cost of the minimum useful system). That means that, if the extra features are worth the money, buy the higher-end version.

The free lower-end version is great for (as they say) students, hobbyists, and novices. Students often don't have much money, and hobbyists and novices often don't want to spend all that much money on their hobbies and introductions.

However, a software professional is making money writing software, and presumably will make more money if he or she becomes more efficient. Assuming our professional is making decent money, the cost of an upper-end version of VS isn't large compared to revenues, and if it leads to even modest productivity increases it's worth it.

When you're doing something for money, don't try to do things too much on the cheap. Taking more time and inconvenience to do things will cost real money in that case, and avoiding it is worth real money.

Microsoft's marketing approach to these Express editions may be is to introduce Visual studio flavors to users (any user). Later, bring them on board with more powerful versions. Also, Express editions allows you to write code anywhere without getting worried about licensing part. You can use them to try out your test bed projects, community projects etc. I must re-iterate again that free licensing is the biggest draw towards Express editions

The only substantive differences I've found are the integration of code control and the ability to create heterogeneous projects. The first is not a major issue if you are the only developer. With the Express versions, You can use whatever code control mechanism you like, just not built in.

The second is only an issue if you want to develop using some combination of C++, C# or VB in the same project. You need at least VS2010 Professional to do that. Given the extensive features in C#, the absolute need to use C++ or VB with it in the same project is highly unlikely. However, those situations exist if you need C++ in a C# project for some low level API or have a legacy VB system and need some feature from C# or C++ that is just too difficult to manage in VB.

As a friend who built racing engines once observed: Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go? Express is free, the others can be pricey, although the price for VS2010 Professional just plummeted with the advent of VS2012.