I recently was in need of building a program and wanted it to be windows based, and decided to get back in to visual basic. After realising that I couldn’t find my Visual Basic 6 CD, definitely lost somewhere over the years of it being forgotten, I decided to check out what they were up to online and see if I could grab a copy of the latest  Visual Basic, heading to the Microsoft site, I was amazed to see that they had finally pulled their finger out and made a free version of their visual studio. At only a gigabyte to download, I quite contently downloaded it and was ready to go.

Now I hadn’t used Visual Studio 2005, I hadn’t even used any of them since high school, and was a bit scared of what was going on, as the environment was completely foreign to me. However reading a few webpages on 2005, it was pretty much self explanatory, very similar to the original as the coding style hadn’t really changed, and I was back in action.

For the coding hobbyists and students and the like who can’t afford to be shelling out cash for the full version of Visual Studio, the express version is well worth the download.

If you are curious to see what the express version is lacking, (as it is a stripped down version), check out the wikipedia article,  or the official site.

Overall I was impressed. Impressed that Microsoft was finally beginning to feel the pressure from the open-source movement in such a way that they finally clicked that if they wanted more people programming in their language, they were going to have to have a free IDE. I was also impressed with the functionality, for something that is free and from Microsoft, it works quite well.