Microsoft has begun offering free Editions of its widely used Visual Studio Development package as Visual Studio Express Editions.

All the editions of Visual Studio Express will be offered as free downloads: Visual Web Developer™ Express, Visual Basic® Express, Visual C#® Express, Visual C++® Express and Visual J#® Express.

You can view about the various Express Edition Tools available here.
The download links in these page will download an Installer that will install the application downloading from the internet. You'll need to activate the downloaded software for free to use it. the major drawback of this method is, if you wanna reinstall the software again in future you'll have to download again.

Here is an alternate solution,

You can download the CD images of the tools you need from this page.

After downloading this tools follow the instructions in the above page to know about the steps to follow for manual installation.

You need not acivate your software if you use this method.

You are abit late with the news, I have been using Visual Basic Express for over a year now. Well, I say using, but I stopped, as I realized that learning a platform specific language was abit useless, especially when there were other languages like Python that are still interpreted, but don't only run on a single OS.

Still, something like Visual Basic is probably a good language to learn the basics of programming in.

This post has been edited by Yacoby: Nov 18 2006, 01:15 PM

yes they were out before an year but then they were in Beta and CTP testin durin that time
now it is complete

I have been using some of the free express editions, but at the time of download, they had a time limit, i think it was of a year, but now, as you can see in the following news link, they are free forever now:

Visual Studio Express Editions are Free Forever!
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2...ressFreePR.mspx


I find this express editions very usefull and good tools to actually learn how to develop websites and programs/tools, visual basic is one of the most used languages, and just for you to know, there are tons of applications built with visual basic programming language, it is not my favorite, i prefer c#, actionscript, php, sql and javascript.

yes the Free Express Editions of Visual Studio is now very useful for Freelancers who cannot invest a huge amount in their initial stage.