Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition for Windows

If you're a gamer who wants to learn more about game development or a developer who wants to sharpen your development skills, check out these free developer learning resources that teach you, step-by-step, how to develop your own arcade games on the PC. Microsoft Visual Studio Express offers powerful development tools for all skill levels and lets you design great-looking and easy-to-use applications using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface designer.

Express Edition products are designed for hobbyists, students, and novice developers. As such, they lack the full breadth of features found in higher-end Visual Studio. The user interfaces are significantly streamlined to ensure that extraneous features do not interfere with the learning process.