

Visual Studio 11 Express (Free) Editions will only target Metro Apps - hkarthik
http://www.osnews.com/story/25977/Visual_Studio_11_Express_editions_Metro-only

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px1999
The problem with this is that the express editions are a stepping stone for
new / younger programmers (and for devs wanting to contribute to OSS). The
harm that it'll do will be to the whole .NET platform (and the ability to find
good .NET devs in the mid-long term), which would overshadow any benefits of
people moving to MonoDevelop or similar (they're more likely to just move to
other languages).

Not sure what Microsoft is trying to achieve by this - it's a bit of a shift
from their previous stance of giving as much stuff to developers as possible,
using that to prop up the windows ecosystem.

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kristianp
Microsoft is clearly trying to encourage people to make touch apps. Windows
phone and windows 8 fondle-slabs need an ecosystem of apps if they are going
to be competitive.

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kristianp
The actual source of this information:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/18/a-lo...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/18/a-look-
ahead-at-the-visual-studio-11-product-lineup-and-platform-support.aspx)

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seanmcdirmid
So what this means is that if you want to write Windows 8 desktop
applications, you'll need to fork over $$$ for pro Visual Studio or not use
Microsoft's IDE tool chain. I'm not sure what to think about this.

