¶Visual C# Express is really limited

I tried using Visual C# Express 2008 to write a program, and wow... it was more limited than I imagined:

• You can't create a solution.
• There's no breakpoints pane, which means you can't clear all breakpoints.
• There's no command window (which was the other way I tried to clear all breakpoints).
• The fun one: I created a multithreaded application, only to discover that when I tried to debug it, there's no threads pane. Argh!!

Here's the funny part. You can work around the first one by installing XNA Game Studio... or you can work around all of them by installing Visual C++ Express, which can do all of the above and comes on the same disc image. It can even debug C# applications, if you open the executable.

I know that Express editions are supposedly built for a simplified experience and they're free, but this seems a bit silly (and a little worrying, since Standard Edition is going away in VS2010). Visual C++ Express has enough that developing an application at least as complex as VirtualDub is doable; I'm not sure that C# Express is up to the same task.

Comments

This blog was originally open for comments when this entry was first posted, but was later closed and then removed due to spam and after a migration away from the original blog software. Unfortunately, it would have been a lot of work to reformat the comments to republish them. The author thanks everyone who posted comments and added to the discussion.