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[Nadaka]

I am about to embark on the task of redoing my asp.net web site and other things. I have an old copy of the full featured Visual Studio 2008 left over from when I used to work in a Microsoft only company.

I know I would .net versions above 3.5 and MVC versions above 2.

But does anyone know what features I would lose by moving to the latest free visual studio?

I can't really seem to find any information from either google or the msdn library, and I am a bit out of touch with the ms community after spending the last 5 years in a java only company.

[gimlet]

I haven't used it this century, but I did just recently see you can still get a 90 day free trial of VS2012 Pro -  http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads
This looks like a decent summary of diffs, if you follow the link in the last post too: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/166716/visual-studio-2012-express-vs-professional

[Nadaka]

Yea. that part is easy to find. Finding a comparison of 2008 professional isn't. And I don't want to rely on a 90 day free trial for maintaining the software I write.

[Fayrik]

You might have to look up what the difference between 2008 and 2010 versions were, then 2010 and 2012, and then compare that to the express version. It's long winded, but I don't expect Microsoft would make it any easier.

Personally I just stuck to the 2008 version. I didn't really see the point in downgrading to 2010 express. (Which can be run in tandem, I must note.)

Then 2012 came around, and it broke backwards porting to 4.0/windows XP.

[Vespulan]

Personally I just stuck to the 2008 version.

So did I, general rule of thumb for me is if someone updates some programming software, it won't work with anything.  If you have 2008 Pro then I'd stick with it

[Nadaka]

As an update: I discovered that the biggest thing missing from VS Express is the ability to connect to arbitrary databases in the designer, which makes it a lot harder to use a MySql backend.

Note that this was an undocumented dis-feature.