Microsoft has expanded the Visual Studio product line with the addition of six new Express products designed to help the student, hobbyist, enthusiast, or novice developer become proficient with the Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform as quickly as possible.

Based upon the same code-base as their professional cousins in the Visual Studio 2005 product line, the express products have been on a diet, allowing them to be downloaded easily even when connecting to the Internet using a dialup connection.

Microsoft has provided six express beta products, which are all freely available at http://labs.msdn.microsoft.com/express/. The express product line consists of the following products:

• Visual Basic 2005 Express
• Visual C# 2005 Express
• Visual C++ 2005 Express
• Visual J# 2005 Express
• Visual Web Developer 2005 Express
• SQL Server 2005 Express

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition provides the developer with everything required to develop advanced ASP.NET 2.0 applications and doesn't even require the standard Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server; in fact, a test Web server is included in the box. So even if you're using Windows XP Home Edition, which ships without IIS, you'll be able to rapidly develop some cool looking ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications.

Visual Web Developer Express 2005 seamlessly integrates with SQL Server 2005 Express, allowing you to develop powerful data-centric ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications and Web services.

Because the express products are based upon the same 2.0 version of the .NET Framework as their professional cousins; you'll also be able to capitalize upon the powerful new additions to ADO.NET and System.Xml within the applications you build with Visual Web Developer 2005 Express.

By the time the final release build of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition ships it will be accompanied by a new management tool. SQL Server 2005 Express Manager is built using the .NET Framework 2.0 and the new SQL Server System Management Objects API, and will provide much-needed management functionality that was missing from its predecessor MSDE.

Currently SQL Server 2005 Express databases can be administered either through the Database Explorer within Visual Web Developer Express or through command line utilities. Obviously, considering the intended audience of the express products, I'd recommend looking at the Database Explorer before exploring the powerful command line alternatives.

ASP.NET 2.0 provides you with access to over 50 new server controls that allow you to seamlessly integrate powerful features such as security, data access, menus, tree views, and so on.

ASP.NET 2.0 also provides a truly revolutionary ability to achieve visual inheritance of Web Forms using Master Pages which can be used to provide a common look and feel throughout the application.

By the time you're able to download the final release of Visual Web Developer it will ship with several starter kits designed to both provide an accelerated learning experience and be powerful enough and wide enough in scope that they can provide a good foundation upon which you can develop your own Web sites.

Beta 1 of Visual Web Developer 2005 provides the Personal Web Site Starter Kit, which allows you to rapidly build a home page using some of the advanced features of ASP.NET 2.0 such as the new Membership API.

Even though Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is a simpler offering than the version of Visual Web Developer found within Visual Studio 2005 Enterprise Architect (Beta 1), it comes packed with some very powerful features to help the developer do what they like to do best ... write cool code! Or in the case of Visual Web Developer, design awesome Web sites!

If you're using the C# language then you have access to several built-in refactorings such as Extract Method, Encapsulate Field, and Rename Method/Type.

Refactoring is defined in the book of the same name by Martin Fowler as:

"Refactoring (noun): a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing its observable behavior". - Martin Fowler

Once you've had an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, which supports features like refactoring, you'll wonder how you ever survived without it ... imagine going back to the dark ages before IntelliSense! Within Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition your code can no longer hide from the IntelliSense engine (see Figure 2). IntelliSense is everywhere, even within the XHTML source code, style pages, code beside / code behind, configuration files and XML files (so long as they are accompanied by an associated XML schema).

You might have noticed that I said XHTML and not merely HTML! Within ASP.NET 2.0 the HTML within Web Forms is by default now based on the XHTML standard that in essence is HTML adhering to the well-formedness rules of XML.

There are many other awesome new features for the Web developer in Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. Although I could write an entire book about them I'll let you explore the cool features mentioned here and many more besides by downloading your own copy at http://labs.msdn.microsoft.com/express/.

Finally, I'd like to mention two other Web sites that will be of interest to anyone looking at Visual Web Developer Express and the Visual Studio 2005 products.

The ASP.NET team has provided a really cool guided tour of the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express product at http://beta.asp.net/GuidedTour/default.aspx.

If, like me, you've thought in the past about a cool new feature or two that you hoped Microsoft would provide for you in a future release, only to wish you had a contact in Redmond to tell them about it, then you can finally do exactly that using the product feedback center, found at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/

Product Name: Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2005 Beta 1
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Rating: ****
Reviewer: Doug Holland