Visual Studio Express vs Professional

Visual Studio Express

Visual Studio Express Editions are a set of free lightweight individual IDEs which are provided as stripped-down versions of the Visual Studio IDE on a per-language basis, i.e., it installs the language services for the supported languages onto individual Visual Studio Shell AppIds. It includes only a small set of tools as compared to the other systems - devoid of remote database support for data designer, class designer and several other tools and features as well as support for plug-ins. x64 compilers are not available for the Visual Studio Express edition IDEs. Microsoft targets the Express IDEs at students and hobbyists. Express editions also do not use the full MSDN Library but use the MSDN Express Library. The languages available as part of the Express IDEs are

Visual Basic Express
Visual C++ Express
Visual C# Express
Visual Web Developer Express

Visual Studio Standard

Visual Studio Standard Edition provides an IDE for all supported products and can support the entire MSDN library. It supports XML and XSLT editing, object test benches, and can create deployment packages that only use ClickOnce. However, it does not include tools like Server Explorer or include integration with Microsoft SQL Server. Visual Studio Standard can only consume Add-Ins for extensibility. Mobile development support was included in Visual Studio 2005 Standard, however, with Visual Studio 2008, it is only available in Professional and higher editions. Remote debugging support is included in Visual Studio 2008 Professional and Team Edition only.

Visual Studio Professional

Visual Studio Professional Edition includes the tools in Visual Studio Standard and augments it with other functionality such as Microsoft SQL Server integration (which allows databases to be created from within Visual Studio) and a remote debugger (for 2005 Editions) (that allows debugging a remote system from within Visual Studio debugger provided a debugging server is running on the remote system). Visual Studio Professional accepts all three extensibility mechanisms.

Suppose I have 4 developers:

- one developer uses Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition
- one developer uses Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
- two developers use the Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition

Can all of them contribute to the *SAME* web project using their version of Visual Studio 2005?

Web Project, yes. But, this depends on what you call a web project.

Here are some issues:

1. If you are working multiple tiers
a) Professional
i. All projects in a single solution
ii. Full database support
b) Standard
i. All projects in a single solution
ii. Little data support, have to write more code
c) Express
i. Has to reference other projects without much help from IDE
ii. Little data support in the product

2- Can I use Visual SourceSafe 2005 to maintain this project?

Yes, but the Express developers will have to check out from VSS client and
not in the IDE.

3- can a project (written entirely with the Express Edition) be used in the Professional Edition, and vice versa?
Yes. The question comes down to whether you are writing 100% of your logic
in your web application or using multiple tiers. As mentioned above, Express
has no direct support for multiple projects in a single solution, so you
cannot debug all tiers in the product for an end-to-end debug
.