By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
Microsoft released a free IDE to build .NET applications when they released .NET 2.0 a while back. I have been using it to rewrite some utilities at work. I have to say I am pretty impressed so far. The IDE does not offer all of the features that the full Visual Studio 2005 does, but it still has a lot of power.
It will work with SQL Server express edition and it has a feature for connecting to web services.
Apple already offers a free IDE, and there are several in the Java world. This is a first for Microsoft, and I think ther will be a lot of new .NET application written because they released this IDE. Kudos to Microsoft.