Are Visual Studio Express products really only for "hobbyists, students and novices" ?

Programmer Question

I have Visual Studio Professional 2008, and have been testing the free C# Express 2010 version. In general I'm amazed at how good it is for free, and how many of the full VS features it has. I'm thinking of using it for a commercial program and I know the license allows for that, it's just the description of it being for "non-professional developers like hobbyists, students and novice developers" concerns me a bit.

What I'm interested in knowing is what is stopping it being 'professional', that is:

• Have you evaluated the express edition, and found a specific useful feature lacking that stopped you from using it ? Or did you initially use the express versions, but upgraded to full VS because of a feature lacking ? If so, what was that feature ?

I've searched for similar questions and found lists of differences between the full VS and express versions, but I'm more interested in knowing peoples personal experiences with it. It seems like many of the extra features in VS target developers working in large teams, so I'm mainly interested in hearing from either solo or small team developers where it seems like there's less compelling reasons to upgrade.

The limitations I've personally encountered are:

• Extensions not being supported, though I can still use DotTrace, NUnit and an obfuscator outside of the VS integration, albeit it's a bit less convenient.


• Limited refactoring, although the "Rename" and "Extract Method" are still there and I think they're the most useful. No 'Encapsulate Field' is annoying though.


• More limited debugging for multi-threaded apps.


• Edit: Another is that you can't easily switch between targeting "Any CPU/x86/x64" in Express like you can in VS. It is possible, but needs manually editing your project file to do so.

But the pluses seem to outweigh the minuses so far. Is there anything you found was a deal-breaker for you ?

Find the answer here