Microsoft Announces Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop

I love the smell of capitulation in the morning.

Remember all the faux uproar when Microsoft revealed that classic desktop application developers looking for a free environment would need to use Visual Studio 2008 Express editions instead of Visual Studio 2012? Yeah, forget that. Microsoft will make a Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop now. So quit yer griping.

“We heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level,” Microsoft corporate vice president S. Somasegar wrote in a blog post announcing the change. “Today, I’m happy to announce that we will add Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop to the Visual Studio 2012 family. This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we’ve made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications.”

According to Somasegar, Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop will support C++, C#, or Visual Basic development, include the latest compilers and programming language tools, and work with Team Explorer and TFS Express. It will ship this fall alongside the other Visual Studio 2012 editions.