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Dan's Visual Basic Blog

By Dan Mabbutt, About.com Guide to Visual Basic since 2002

VBE For Free!

Saturday April 22, 2006

I told you so!

The current series, "Learn Visual Basic .NET 2005" uses VBE - Visual Basic .NET 2005 Express Edition because it's good, but also because it's FREE!

Or at least, according to the official announcement last November, it would be free for one year. There was quite a lot of confusion about that at the time. I made a special effort to quiz the program managers at the official launch event in San Francisco and I still got the story wrong. So in Lesson 1 of the Learn VBE tutorial now in progress, I wrote, "Since Microsoft has a history of changing their corporate mind on things like this, we'll just have to see what they say next November to be sure."

The good news is that we don't have to wait until November to find out. Microsoft just announced that VBE is now a free distribution product:

The Visual Studio 2005 Express editions now join the SQL Server 2005 Express editions as a no-cost offering within the Microsoft application platform.

Comments

May 8, 2006 at 11:56 pm
(1) Sheryl says:

Woohoo! Great news for us! Especially students who wants to learn .Net, but can’t because of the cost of the software. Finally, IT’s Free!

May 14, 2006 at 8:06 am
(2) bill ziminsky says:

Do you have a link where I may download The Visual Studio 2005 Express editions and SQL Server 2005 Express editions at a no-cost?

May 14, 2006 at 10:41 am
(3) visualbasic says:

Absolutely!

To download Visual Basic Express:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/download/

To download SQL Server 2005 Express

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/default.aspx

Dan

July 1, 2006 at 7:31 pm
(4) longman says:

first-rate!!! http://www.clifty.akentucky.com

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