Yesterday at Tech.Ed Europe, we announced the availability of the "Express" products which are a great new addition to the Visual Studio 2005 family. Created specially for students, hobbyists, enthusiasts who want to get started programming with the .NET Framework, they are lightweight, easy to use, easy to learn tools for building dynamic Windows applications and Web sites. And they were demoed live in front of 5,000 developers at Tech.Ed Europe by the one and only Andy Sterland who is a Microsoft Student Partner from the University of Hull and who is shortly joining the Academic Developer team in the UK on a 12 month student internship.

You can now download the Express products for free and if you’re at a lose end during the summer holidays you can also put your coding skills and creativity to good use by entering the Summer of Express competition which challenges you to create “non business” applications using any of the Express products.