As a professional developer is it a must to have a paid version of Visual Studio?

I've seen the express edition of visual studio and it loo开发者_StackOverflowks great, something you wouldn't expect to be free. I'm curious, however, if as a professional developer (C# mostly) can you work with just the express edition ? Is it worth investing the money in the professional or ultimate edition?

Thank you.

As a professional developer is it a must to have a paid version of Visual Studio ?

No.

There's SharpDevelop and there's MonoDevelop which are great and sometimes even greater then VS. You can use whatever you want, as long as you get the job done.

Yes you can work with the Express edition. Nothing in the EULA forbids you to do so.

No, the Express edition is perfectly fine for professional development - both legally and technically. However, you might soon miss some of the features of the professional and higher versions - especially if you're used to them. ;-) Things that come to mind are refactoring (only very basic in VS2010 Express) and the lack of solution folders in project explorer (for solutions consisting of more than a few projects).

Here you can see the difference : http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products

In any case framework is the same. The difference is additional product features across different VS versions.

If you are home developer, Express may be good enough. For a company it a must to have something better.

I wanted to do Windows Mobile development but discovered it is not possible in VS Express version. So you must pay for VS if you want to do Windows Mobile development.