I know this is old old old news, but I thought I might as well post a blog entry about it.
"Dear Visual Studio Express community, we are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!"Also check out the cool new tools.It is pretty cool when you think about it, I think that it will introduce a whole set of new developers to Windows and ASP.Net. I know of one of my friends who has taken an Express version and loved it. He was pretty gutted though when he found out some of the limitations (like only one project per solution). But that is by the by when you think about all the stuff it gives budding developers.read more | digg story