What is the difference among Visual Studio Express edition, microsoft.net and VS professional edition?

Could anyone guide me as what is the difference among the following, 1) Visual Studio Express Edition 2)Visual Studio Professioanl Edition 3) Microsoft .Net And is ther开发者_运维知识库e any thing like Visual Studio.Net?

Please guide me, as I am currently working on express edition, but my other colleaques are working on different environment which I don't know (language is same for all developers i.e. VB), and I need to do some working on their implemented codes as well.

Please guide me,

Regards Asad

"Microsoft .NET" is a platform rather than an IDE. It's not really comparable with the other two.

The Express editions of Visual Studio are basically cut down versions of the commercial editions. In particular, Express doesn't allow plug-ins such as ReSharper to run - but there are various other limitations too. If you're a professional software developer, you should almost certainly ask your company to provide you with VS Professional (or higher, but Pro will probably be fine). You certainly can develop in Express, but it's really designed for hobbyists rather than professional developers.

Visual Studio was called Visual Studio .NET just for two releases - 2002 and 2003.

The .Net framework is a collection of libraries. Visual Studio Professional is the paid edition of Visual Studio Express. There is also a Standard Edition which has less functionality than the Pro version.

One difference between Express and Pro is that the Pro Edition has the possibility to connect to a database (like SQL Manager studio)