Rue Plumet

I finally got around to installing Visual Studio Express on my machine at home. It’s been out for quite some time, but I just never managed to get it installed until now. I have a few personal projects that I want to work on in the near future, so instead of doing the Citrix to VNC jump to access my machine at work, I thought it would probably be easier just to write them locally on my home machine.

The install went fine and it didn’t even require a reboot (I already had .Net Framework 2.0 installed, which might be why the reboot was unnecessary). The product is, of course, limited in various ways compared to the full blown version of Visual Studio, but it looks like enough of the basic options are there to let me do what I need to do for the smaller projects I have in mind. The one thing that really surprised me is how fast the program launches. I have a pretty old machine at home (pushing four years old now) and my machine at work is only a little over a year old, yet Visual Studio Express launches significantly faster at home than the full-blown Visual Studio does on my machine at work. I think that’s kind of weird. Maybe the Express version has so many features taken out that there just isn’t as much to load, but it seems weird to me that the free version launches almost immediately, while the expensive version takes its sweet time to get going.