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I have a license for the Professional edition but I for the most part I just use it as a text editor. So I have to ask, what limitations of the Express editions make them non-viable for big projects?

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* Static code analysis, profiling, and HLSL editing and debugging

* Multi-unit testing framework and refactoring support

* Third-party extensibility support

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/13263786/204927

Honestly, all of those things are still secondary to actually developing. You can write great code without doing static analysis and profiling it. And with the most recent version, NuGet is included even in Express.

The biggest roadblocks to .NET development/adoption are not toolchain related IMO, they are platform related. If you want to bring up a farm of windows boxes, you're gonna pay.

* You get enough static analysis so that broken code won't compile.

* Testing can be done through other tools such as Nunit.

* With VS2012, you get extensions developed by Microsoft, such as NuGet.

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