The company will add it to the Express family of development tools this fall

Jun 11, 2012 12:39 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft appears determined to facilitate easy development of applications for its various platforms, so as to build a strong ecosystem across its products.

Not too long ago, the company announced that it would make Express editions of Visual Studio 2012 available for Windows 8, Windows Phone, and for Web and Windows Azure.

However, there’s more to it, as the company also listened to feedback coming from developers interested in benefiting from a similar experience when the Windows desktop was involved.

Thus, the company announced the release of Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop, which is meant to expand the Visual Studio 2012 family to provide increased value to developers.

“This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we’ve made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications,” the company notes.

As stated above, Microsoft built Visual Studio 2012 so as to deliver a great development experience on a variety of platforms.

“This includes enabling developers to bring to life the richness of Windows desktop applications - whether you are learning to build your first app or whether you’ve been developing on Microsoft platforms for many years,” the software giant explains.

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop will arrive with the same core principles as other Express products, being capable to offer a simple, end-to-end development experience to all devs interested in coming up with apps for Windows versions supported by Visual Studio 2012.

“With this new Express edition, developers will be able to use C++, C#, or Visual Basic to create Windows desktop and console applications,” says Microsoft.

“Developers will also get access to new advances available across the Express family in Visual Studio 2012, such as the latest compilers and programming language tools, integrated unit testing, and the ability for small development teams to collaborate via Team Explorer and TFS Express.”

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is meant to arrive sometime this fall, offering a great learning environment for students and other yet inexperienced developers.

Existing developers will find it simple to enhance their desktop apps with the latest toolsets, while open source applications will be easily brought to existing and previous versions of Windows.