I was mistaken last night in thinking that the Microsoft 2005 Express product line which is made up of releases of Visual Basic 2005, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, Visual Web Dev, SQl Server. would be available later, they have been released as Beta’s and can be downloaded today. I am not sure how I missed that but the downloads and programs are being provided for Free during BETA. They are supposedly going to be very inexpensive when officaly released. There are even several Microsoft blogs that are being hosted by the Express team to give more insight.
For those of you that missed my earlier comments. The express versions of these products are aimed at the beginner programmer or what Microsoft has dubbed the nonprofessional. In my opinion this is a very very smart move by Microsoft and may even encourage people like me who have never written a single line of code to buy some books and give it a roll.
I am really excited about SQL Server 2005 Express as that is a product I have always wanted to mess around with. Scobleizer has a article that you all must read. He has a segment on their about Microsoft Bug reports also that I am going to investigate separately. A lot to dig thru today. [Scoble] [Microsoft Express]