.NET for freelance projects?

Question

I'm looking to do a website for a client and I am considering using ASP.NET. Can I use the express version of Visual Studio to build this or do I have to buy a license?

Answer 1

Yes, Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 Express is a great development platform. It does most of the stuff needed for professional development, let alone developing as hobbyist.

Answer 2

Keep in mind that many of the "big" web hosting companies are PHP/MySQL based and don't support .Net/Mono. Make sure your client's host can support the technology you intend to use.

Answer 3

You can get yourself a developer edition of VS. It will be relatively inexpensive. Since you will hand the the site to the customer and not run it yourself, you can get away with the limitation the developer edition imposes.

Answer 4

You can use the Express versions but you will have to have a number of Express versions open (Web,C#,etc) to do the dev work.

It will make life easier if you have a licenced version of VS so you dont have to chop and change.

Answer 5

VS Express comes in different flavors, each targeting different roles and purposes. I think you may find ASP.NET development with VS Express somewhat fragmented (some features are only available in the WebDevelop edition, while other only in the C# edition) - but it certainly is possible.

If you are looking for a free IDE for .NET to do ASP development, you may also be interested in looking into Mono Develop - it can target all versions of the .NET framework at this point (not just the Mono ones) and it's quite stable. I've used that successfully for development on several projects - and while it's not as feature rich as VS, it is quite good.

Answer 6

Mostly, Express version is enought. But it's much more easier with full ver.