The big announcement from TechEd Europe is that there will be 'nominally' priced Express Editions of Visual Studio for hobbyists, students and enthusiasts, including the replacement for SQL MSDE, available in beta from the end of this week. 

Microsoft have realised that they need to make Visual Studio more available to those who want to learn to write application (perhaps not professionals).  All of the major languages will have Express Editions with Visual Studio (C#, VB.NET, C++, J#) as well as SQL Server 2005.

They will be available at a nominal low price that will not be a barrier to getting into programming windows.  As Joel said last week - Microsoft will basically give the development tools for free.

SQL 2005 Express is the replacement for MSDE.  This will be free for download from the end of this week (some more audience drumming drumming).

The focus is learning how to program, evaluate .NET, interact with students and build cool apps.

They all come with a starter kit that contains samples.  The VB one allows you to catalogue the DVD collection.  It uses Amazon's web service to pull down the artwork and details of a DVD (nice!).  The edition shows all of the standard controls.  It also ships with code snippets.  Edit and continue is also enabled (big drumming!)

The MSDN content is now going to search MSDN, MSDN online and the codewise community sites.

Strangely the demo showed the presenter copying and pasting (cargo cultist anyone?) including all sorts of declare statements to enable an image to work as the desktop background.

The intellisense will now offer to fix problems (e.g. missing trailing ')') and offer to add them for you.  Finally.  The demo also showed VB's My feature to enable quicker access to functionality.