Is Visual Studio 2010 Express for MVC Development?

Question

I am a little behind the curve and want to make my first serious ASP.NET MVC project.

Are there any significant limitations or disadvantages of using VS 2010 Express for developing asp.net mvc?

Answer 1

There are no restrictions. Feel free to use the VS2010 Express version to develop ASP.NET MVC. The only thing you cannot use the MS Test platform for unit tests is, and you need to go for something like NUnit, which is not necessarily a bad thing :-) Just maybe you will have a little less integration into the IDE with things like unit tests code coverage ... you have to use third-party tools.

There is only one thing that needs to be considered and which is of paramount importance before starting a large project: is the time that your developers spend on setting up third-party tools cheaper than paid versions of VS2010? In other words, how much are your developers? See paragraph 9 of the Joel test .

Answer 2

One of the drawbacks is that VS Express does not support extensions. I use ankhsvn to control versions that cannot be used in VS express. However, why not start with Express? You can always switch to the paid version if you really need it.

Answer 3

Express versions do not support StartAction to run an external program if you need it. See MSDN How to Change the Launch Action for Debugging Applications .

I did not find an alternative for this case.

Update: try http://www2.wealth-lab.com/Wiki/kbDebugExpress.ashx step 13 to suggest how MSVC considers its debugging your code directly. - Unmarried.