visual studio express edition features

Question

DO you know if the express edition of visual studio 2005/2008 supports calling of managed C++ code from C#?

Answer 1

Yes it does.

The Expression Editotions of Visual Studio in no way limit the languages. The languages are themselves a feature of Visual Studio and are included with 100% parity between the non-free versions of Visual Studio. Any code you see on SO will compile just fine in an expression edition of VS.

In fact if you don't like VS (what's wrong with you :) ), you can download the compiler separately as part of the SDK and do everything from the command line.

The difference between the expression editions of VS and the non-free ones are the tools that are bundled with the IDE. For example the profiler and certain TFS products are not available in the free versions of VS.

Answer 2

You will need to jump through an extra hoop with the Express Editions, since they do not bundle all the languages into one package. Instead of having a single SLN as you would in Visual Studio Standard that contains your C# projects, C++, C++/CLI, VB, etc, you will need to create separate SLN's for each language type, and then hook them up via an external reference (ie, an arbitrary DLL).