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by Anand M.
Original Post: Express Editions Free for 1 year
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I had been expecting something like this to happen. It is now official that the Express editions will have a honeymoon period of 1 year, when they are free(after that they are going to cost USD 49, which works out to be roughly Rs.2000) and you can just go and download them from MSDN. This really opens up .NET development to a lot of people who were disadvantaged by the cost of Visual Studio. One of the biggest group I can think of is the Student Community. As CNUG has a students chapter, I get a chance to talk to quite a lot of students. When I talk about .NET and show then VS, then get quite excited and the first thing they ask is how can we start playing around with it. The current answer that I give is to use the SDK with Notepad or Sharpdevelop.
But now they have acess to a toolkit which is very similar to what they will face when they actually get into the workforce.
I would have prefered if they had made the Express SKU free for ever(like the SQL Server Express Edition), but then this is still a very good start. Good Show Microsoft....
Note: The download can be quite big, upto 70MB and with MSDN library and SQL Express can go up to 400+MB as pointed out at the site.
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