Visual Web Developer Express and .NET, et al.

Question

I'm coming from the open source world, and interested in giving ASP.NET a spin. But I'm having a little trouble separating the tools from the platform itself in regards to the licensing. I've downloaded Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, but not sure how different this is from one of the full-featured Visual Studio licenses -- and whether or not my Express license will prevent me from using all the features of ASP.NET.

Is a Visual Studio license just an IDE, or does it include pieces of .NET not available to the Express license? What about the other tools like IIS and SQL Server?

Thanks.

Answer 1

All of .net is available in the .net SDK, so in theory you will not need Visual Studio at all.

Now, there are some things that Express will not do. For example, the Database Designer is not very comprehensive and adding different remote databases is not or only very hardly possible. Still, in code you can connect to everything.

There is also no Remote Debugger, no support for creating Setup Files (well, that does not apply to ASP.net anyway), no real Publish Web Site Feature (although that can be added manually as it's just a Frontend for a SDK tool), no integrated Unit testing (and Microsoft loves to threaten people who add it), etc.

For a full comparison, see here:

Visual Studio 2008 Editions

But as said: Functionality of .net is all in the SDK, Visual Studio is just making it a bit easier to work with.

Answer 2

Visual Studio is just an IDE, you can do all your .NET development with the SDK and notepad if you choose. In fact there is something to be said for learning it that way so you understand better how the pieces fit together!

Microsoft have a version comparison matrix available so you can see exactly what is included each version.

IIS is a Windows component and considered part of the OS, there is nothing else to buy.

SQL Server comes in many flavours, SQL EXpress is free to use and whilst limited compared to the versions you pay for, it is more than enough to get started with ASP.Net

Answer 3

Visual Studio is the IDE and does not include the platform.

IIS and SQL Server are separate products. IIS is available as part of the windows install and the version is different depending on what version of Windows you are using.

SQL Server also has an express product which is not as full featured as the Full versions of SQL Server, yet it is still rather valuable and useful especially for learning purposes.

You can learn a lot from the free tutorials found on asp.net.

Answer 4

Visual Studio is just the IDE. You could theoretically create every file in Notepad and compile manually with just the .net framework.

IIS is an operating system feature, and SQL Server has different flavors with different capabilites.

Answer 5

SharpDevelop is a Open Source IDE for C# and VB.net

Answer 6

Thanks everyone. It makes a bit more sense now.