programming languages

For the money, I guess I can't complain. The standard edition is a fraction of the cost of the "full meal deal", but wish that MS wasn't so deceptive with their advertising. Microsoft's web page for VB.Net 2003 standard edtion displays all the features of the full blown version and none of the limitations that are in the standard version are listed. Given that, I would still buy it as this is my only choice. The one big limitation is that the standard edtion will not talk to a real SQL server data base. It will hook up to a MSDE database. I did discover that I can talk to an Access database that has tables linked to a SQL server database, so you can fake it, but I can't do Stored procs.
MS used to have a page that listed the differences between versions, but I can't find it now. I don't think you can develop mobile applications either.

Good luck

I bought VB.Net Standard 2003 shortly after having to learn VB for some advanced MS Access programming. What you basically get is the Visual Studio interface with just the VB.Net language functionality. You also get the MSDN library on 3 CDs which comes in handy. There are, however, limits to its functionality:

1) You don't get the Mobile device programming functionality that you get with full Visual Studio.

2) Windows XP Home Edition users: You won't be able to effectively design ASP.Net applications since Microsoft made XP Home incompatible with IIS. There's a couple ways around this, though: (1) there is an unsupported way to install IIS from a Windows 2000 CD- do a web search to find instructions, or (2) download the free WebMatrix from ASP.Net; a very cool and handy program that has it's own little server.

3) Compiling DLLs is not supported in VB.Net Standard. Although I suspect it's possible to program your own compiler, how to do it is still beyond my abilities.

4) There are SQL limitations as well. From what I've read, I think there are limits when using anything more complicated than MSDE or using remote servers.

5) Also, remember how easy it was to draw graphic lines in the VB6 interface? Well those days are definitely over- you had to become a real programmer sometime.

But if you want to learn and program simple executables, this is definitely the way to go. And being able to program ASP.Net websites using VB.Net code from my applications is way-cool.

This was great, I got it for a really good deal from one of the Amazon Sellers and I learned alot from it