I’ve blogged a few times about how good of a value I think Visual C++ Express Edition is. Just last week, I was telling someone that there just aren’t that many compelling differences between Express and Standard (or really even Professional, for my taste), until you get to the Team System stuff (about which I know very little). In fact, he went with Standard just because of ATL, which has been removed from the Vista PSDK. (sigh…)
It turns out that Microsoft has finally added some differentiated features in the form of a new Visual Studio PowerToys pack. There are some great things in there: a source code outliner, support for inserting code snippets, indexed find (great idea!), and more. The only catch is that they don’t work on Express – you have to have Standard, Professional, or Team System.
This seems like a totally reasonable way to differentiate your build tools. My compliments to the product team. This beats the hell out of differentiating on important code security features.