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Microsoft Announces Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop

Jun. 8, 2012 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

I love the smell of capitulation in the morning.

Remember all the faux uproar when Microsoft revealed that classic desktop application developers looking for a free environment would need to use Visual Studio 2008 Express editions instead of Visual Studio 2012? Yeah, forget that. Microsoft will make a Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop now. So quit yer griping.

“We heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level,” Microsoft corporate vice president S. Somasegar wrote in a blog post announcing the change. “Today, I’m happy to announce that we will add Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop to the Visual Studio 2012 family. This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we’ve made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications.”

According to Somasegar, Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop will support C++, C#, or Visual Basic development, include the latest compilers and programming language tools, and work with Team Explorer and TFS Express. It will ship this fall alongside the other Visual Studio 2012 editions.

 

Discuss this Article 6

Waethorn
on Jun 8, 2012
I noticed that in the blog post they were careful not to mention Windows RT.
duluca
on Jun 8, 2012
Now, I wonder if the sites will be quick enough to report this - but then again it's a slow Friday afternoon, so they might. But I wouldn't call the uproar 'faux' because the uproar caused Microsoft to change their mind per your reporting.
LemonSaucy
on Jun 8, 2012
Bloody right thing to do, eh? To Mr. Thurrott: thank you for the article, but the alarm is very real. To Microsoft folks: Thank you for meeting our needs. You do right by me here. Thanks again.
LemonSaucy
on Jun 9, 2012
To Paul Thurrott: with this, you should stop calling Desktop applications "legacy apps". Desktop development is fully supported right now. Plus, as per Microsoft, "apps" is a term for "metro" programs only. What runs on the Desktop are "applications". And since everything from command-line applications to 64-bit Windows applications are supported by current versions of Windows (and are currently being developed), none of these can really be considered "legacy" in the honest non-market-speak sense of the term, and none of these are "apps" as per Microsoft's definition, as they are not targeted for "metro". So please stop insulting those of us who do desktop development. Thanks.
TechnoTim06
on Jun 9, 2012
hmm, i thought Microsoft said VS 2010 Express was the old alternation prior to this announcement, not 2008.
TechnoTim06
on Jun 9, 2012
hmm, i thought Microsoft said VS 2010 Express was the old alternation prior to this announcement, not 2008.

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