I do my coding for Doppler in C# and as a result I did that in Visual Studio .NET 2003. Now I’m moving to the .NET 2.0 framework (which got released recently).

Microsoft now made (in a move to compete with the great free java toolsets out there like Eclipse?) the express editions available as a free download for a year. It does not stop working after a year, you just won’t be able to download it for free anymore after that year. Needless to say I downloaded and registered them all.

For my coding needs, the express editions are just sufficient. Everything is in there, debugging, webservices, the works. Of course the bigger versions of things like that ‘teams’, extended debugging (remote stuff etc.) and some more things. But for the average developer, the express edition is way sufficient (I think at least). If you at a later stage want to upgrade your projects will be 100% compatible both up and down in the releases.

However, there is one thing that is missing in the express editions: the setup project types. In the ‘full’ versions you can create a setup project which allows you to generate an MSI setup file. There is a ‘deploy’ feature, but that was not sufficient for my needs. So I started looking into other setup package solutions and came accross WiX. WiX is an open source project from Microsoft, hosted on SourceForge.net. It works really well, and is fully controlled with XML files. I can really recommend it. If you check it out, make sure you follow a great tutorial which is available at http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/

WiX is generic, and not tied into the .NET products, you can use it for all your installation packaging needs.