Subtitles of the Movie

Well, one of the first questions you're going to have to answer when you start to look at dealing with Visual Studio is exactly what version do I want to get and what versions are out there, and how do those versions differ from each other, and so let's talk about that. First up is the new idea that Microsoft started back in SQL Server, and that is the idea of Express Editions. Now, you download Express Editions, they're totally free, you download them per language. Now this is not a you know, one IDE for everything kind of deal. You have to download an Express Version, like for VB, or for C#, or for C Plus Plus; there's one for WEB and there's one for SQL development for database development and so forth. So you can download these things and obviously since they're free they lack a little bit of functionality. Now this is Microsoft's response to a growing concern that younger people aren't getting their hands on Microsoft's products because, and I'm going to say the A-word here, Apple makes their X Code development environment free of charge. You can just download it from Apple's site, load it on your Apple machine and take off and start programming, and it's fully functional. Well, Microsoft, obviously it's a revenue strain, they have been charging for Visual Studio and it can get quite expensive, and so as a result there's this trend of young people, especially college-age folks, who want to toy with development and customize things and they're going toward those free open-source tools. And so, Microsoft's desperately trying to deal with that. But anyway, let's get back to the topic here, some of the functionalities you don't have in the Express Editions, the Class Designer, which we'll talk about in a different video in this course Ð really cool Ð unit testing, the 64-bit support, now keep in mind this is a 32 bit app that creates 64-bit apps, and there are a lot more things. So, with Express Edition you can download it for free, you can play with it, get your hands around it, but you do miss some functionality. Now, the Standard Edition is the base professional developer tool. This gives you the whole shebang, if you will, a technical term there, but this lets you do multiple project solution support; it lets you target any Framework version 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, so forth. It gives you the database design tools to support more databases than just SQL Server Express Edition, and when I say any database, basically I mean anything you can connect through ODBC, LADB and all that sort of stuff. It gives you the visual modeling with Class Designer, which is really, really cool Ð again we'll see that later Ð it gives you macro support inside Visual Studio so that you can make redundant tasks inside there a lot easier to do. And then, the Professional Edition, now this gives you all the Standard Edition features plus you get Visual Studio tools for Office, it gives you a lot of cool development possibilities with the Office 2000 Suite. It gives you a license to the SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, this is a full SQL Server 2005 working product, but it's developer edition can't be used in the production environment, it's not licensed for that. Then, this gives you also mobile device support and you can actually Ð it's kind of cool, we may look at it later in the Course, you'll actually see a little picture, a little representation of a mobile phone, a hand-held, and you can watch your application run on that little screen and you can develop for those things. You also get Crystal Reports functionality in the Professional Edition. Don't be confused there Ð hang on just a second Ð don't be confused there with Reporting Services, which is a different product that is really cool, we'll talk about Reporting Services, that's a whole nother Course, OK, but anyway, Unit Testing functionality is built into Professional, and you get the Server Explorer. Now, Server Explorer is huge. You'll see it in this Course and it's something really worth having. To be honest with you if you can at all possibly afford it, if you're working for a company and you're doing any kind of serious development I would suggest you get Professional Edition. Now, when you talk about buying Professional Edition it comes in a number of different packages and here they are. First of all you write a check you get Visual Studio 2008 Professional only, and that's all you get. Now you can get this thing packaged with MSDN in a couple of forms, the first one's just kind of a base MSDN packaging with Visual Studio 2008 and then there's an MSDN Premium. Now if you're not familiar with MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network, you subscribe to that and as part of that subscription you get access to all kinds of TechNet, and all kind of technical support, but you also get other licensing to other products to use in your development. And now, let's dig into these MSDN and MSDN Premium things here. First of all, if you get it with MSDN you also get developer licenses, or copies, of the Windows Vista Operating System and Windows Server, and I can't remember, I think it's five licenses each, or three, or something like that. Or, maybe it's one of Server, three or five of Vista, but anyway, you get those licenses so you can build these things and play with them. You get Virtual PC, which is not a biggy because you can download it for free anyway from Microsoft's website Ð we'll talk about that later Ð and you get a number of Software Development Kits, or SDKs. But this lets you kind of build your own environments in the Virtual PC world and you've got a Server to build against and work with, and you've got some Windows Desktop Operating Systems. Then you also get two technical support incidents so you can call Microsoft when you really get confused and maybe they can help you out, and you also get access to Managed Newsgroups. I feel like I'm doing one of these TV Infomercials. But don't order yet, there's more! OK, so, that's the basic with MSDN package and then you can also get MSDN Premium, and if you can afford it this is really cool because you also get Expression Web and Blend, we'll talk about those in a different video. But you also get developer licenses for just about everything they make, which means all the Server products, Visio, Groove, you also get InfoPath, you get the full Office 2007 Suite that, of course we're talking about Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, all that stuff, Outlook, but think about what you can do with this because you can now start to program and build all kinds of apps, so you'll just have to decide. That's the versions of Visual Studio 2008. Decide which one you want, decide what you need, decide to what extent you're going to develop. But I just wanted to get you up to speed on the different versions that are available, and of course, go to Microsoft's site for details.