Have to say "strongly disagree" here.

<b>The tool does not determine the skill of the user.</b>

Sufficiently skilled users may be hampered by the lockdown configuration of the IDE, but the hobbyist can be as much of a real programmer as you or I. The hobbyist can become a professional developer if they work at it diligently and develop a sense of craftsmanship... I'm not saying that it is the most likely outcome, but I can't bring myself to share your position.


Especially since we both started as snot-nosed hobbyists.

Eric, I haven't bothered using the Express line yet. Do they actually hamper you at all or is your post in reaction to the marketing pitch?

Mostly as a reaction to the marketing mumbo jumbo.

Hobbyist is more than fine for usage. I'm more concerned about those people who know just enough about programming to be a walking nuclear weapon and attempt to use express tools to develop small production systems.

I KNOW people will do it.

But will that be any worse than people following MS's VS.NET 2002 and VS.NET 2003 demos, dragging SQL Server tables onto forms, etc? "ooo... ahhh... I dragged a table onto a form and created a bound datagrid WITH NO CODE!!!"

[please note that this was MS's marketing for their REAL .NET tools from the early betas up until DevDays 2004 and possibly still is]

Express Tools Concern II

So how much experience do you have to have before you are qualified to write production code?

How are you supposed to learn how to write production quality code if you don't WRITE code and put it into production?

Shannon: don't forget the "Security and Personalization" controls. Just drag and drop your way to a "secured" application. No thinking required.

So for me, as a recent graduate you're saying; that because I've written code in a free compiler/IDE my code is less valuable than if I used some of our uni's labs handful of commercial versions? People can snarl up big time on both, and if it wasn't for the free .Net SDK I wouldn't even have started with c# (our uni teaches Java).

I imagine you might say as a student I shouldn't have code to go into a production environment anyway, but what about contractors, and employees who want to try out/do a quick job on the .Net platform but don't have a grand or two spare for all the tools.

Personally I think the Express range is one of the best things Microsoft have done to take the power of pc's out of the hands of the elite and into the curious, since they packaged QB with Windows.