Hi! I'm Paul Yuknewicz, Program Manager for the team that designed and brought you Visual Basic Express and the general Express Edition line. I'm super excited to be onsite at the TechEd Europe keynote watching the crowd see Express and MSDN Product Feedback Center for the first time. I'm also proud to kick off the Express blog so that we can chat about all things Express. It's a great feeling to finally be able to talk about it with you!
Express Editions of Visual Studio are all about enabling communities of learning developers, hobbyists, and enthusiast to get started quickly creating cool .NET applications. This is done by providing a totally light weight product: from a 35-80 mb download, to a 5 minute install time, to a simplified and nimble IDE (developer environment). It's easy to get started using resources on the start page that help you build applications, learn how to program (if you're not a maven already), and connect to the community. You can see for yourself right now by downloading Express from here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Express/).

This morning at TechEd Europe, we announced the introduction of "Express" editions of a number of Visual Studio tools and SQL Server. The Express products are lightweight, easy to use, easy to learn tools for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students who want to build dynamic Windows applications and Web sites. We also announced the release of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1.

Man, blogging is addictive. I'm supposed to be paying attention in this session... Anyway, wanted to note a few things about SQL Express because I haven't seen a lot about this online yet - though I expect that to change.
First - some of the capabilities:

• Support for XCopy style deployment
• No workload governor
• Support for databases up to 4Gb in size
• Support for up to 50 instances
• Only supports 1 processor
• Only supports 512 Mb of RAM