Is Visual Studio 2010 Express for MVC development?

I'm a little behind the curve and want to do my first serious ASP.NET 开发者_StackOverflow中文版MVC project.

Are there any significant limitations or drawbacks in using VS 2010 Express for asp.net mvc development?

No there are no limitations. Feel free to use the VS2010 Express version for ASP.NET MVC development. The only thing is that you cannot use the MS Test framework for unit tests and you have to go for something like NUnit which is not necessary a bad thing :-) It's just that you would probably get a little less integration into the IDE with things like Unit Tests, Code Coverage, ... you will have to use third party tools.

There's just one thing to consider and which is of utmost importance before starting a big project: is the time your developers spend on configuring third party tools cheaper than the paid versions of VS2010? In other words how much is your developers time worth? See point 9 of Joel's test.

One disadvantage is that VS Express doesn't support extensions. I use ankhsvn for version control, which can't be used in VS express. However, why don't you just start with Express? You can always switch to a paid version in case you really need it.

The express editions don't support the StartAction for Start External Program should you need it. See MSDN How to: Change the Start Action for Application Debugging.

I've not found an alternative for that case.

Update: Try http://www2.wealth-lab.com/Wiki/kbDebugExpress.ashx step 13 for a suggestion on making MSVC think its debugging your code directly. - Untried.