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 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.