There was a lot of discussions about MS not being clear, but finally I got a
clarification that it is not free for a year, but it is free for a lifetime.
Basically it is a $49 product, but they will have a promostion for a year
and will give it away for free. Again, once you get it it's free for
There is a feature matrix available to better explain, but in short the main
difference is that Express versions do not support any 3rd party components
or tools integrations. So basically it is a very limited environment, but
the language features themselves are same and should work fine for a
