I doubt I'd ever use the screensaver starter kit, but after forking out lots of money for the professional version of Visual Studio, I'd be annoyed if it were missing features that come in the "lite" version.

Hmmm Starter Kits for the enterprise. Well, I could use a "Just Get It Done" starter kit, a "It must be 100% reliable, bug free, low cost and done by next week" starter kit, and my favorite, an "Outsourcing Starter Kit".

Of course, the enterprise user would like to have a superset of what everyone else is getting. If I'm bumping around an area I'm not familiar with, I'd appreciate a few 'hello world' type examples to play with during a lunchbreak before cracking into the real work.

I'm with Sherrod -- even if the possibility is slim that I'd use it, I'd rather have it available than when the time comes that I'd want to use it having to track down a copy of Express, copying the files out and back in blah..

Case in point is the POP connector for Exchange that's available in Windows Server 2003 SBE but not in the stand-alone versions of Exchange. There comes time that one or two users would benefit from a pop connector, but since the POP connector isn't supported, we're forced to go out and get a 3rd party solution and at that point it just doesn't get done. Just include the damn thing and let policy dictate if it should be used or not...


Maybe have a project types category called hobbies or something were these things would reside... if it got to be a big (HD space wise) it could be an on-install option..

I'm an MSDN Universal subscriber and I'm interested in the sample app. There is obviously at least some overlap between the sets of "professional developers" (even "enterprise developers") and "people interested in starter kits." There is nothing unprofessional about starter kits.

Like Paul said, each tier of a product to be a superset of the tiers below it.

-Don

I would prefer if the starter kits weren't part of the install, but I could just download the starter kit as a sample application, just like I can with the current asp.net and WinForms sample apps.

Come on people, we're professional developers here; our Screensavers should be 5 tier, XML driven, OO/AOP, 6 month projects of beauty. We don't need no toy screensaver project!

The solution to all this arguing over what's considered to be "professional" and what's not (which sounds rather presumptive and arrogant BTW...) is to have the installer MSI package display in its feature selection tree dialog box a "Starter Kits" tree-node, with several second-tier tree-nodes below it labelled something like "Complex Starter Kits", "Moderate Starter Kits", and "Simple Starter Kits", and a third-tier-tree-node below each of those to allow for selecting/deselecting individual starter kits.

The defaults could be different for the various flavors of VS, e.g., only the complex subtree defaulted for VS Ent. Arch. or VSTS, only the moderate subtree defaulted for VS Pro, and only simple subtree defaulted for VS Standard/Academic/Express. (Or some other variation...that's overridable!) Of course, no matter which set of defaults you choose, you won't be able to please ALL the users...

In any case, please include ALL starter kits in VSPro, VSEA and VSTS to allow the user to select the ones in which they're interested. Methinks this can be a differienator between VSExpress and the higher-level versions: it should only contain the simple starter kits.

Just because someone is a professional developer doesn't mean they're not a hobby developer too.

I do professional work during business hours and write hobby type apps at home or on weekends. I'd certainly want the screen saver starter in VS Pro.

More importantly, I want a VB version of the screen saver in VS Pro. Seems like most of Microsoft's screen saver samples over the years have been in some form of C so I have to translate the interesting parts to VB 5/6/.net to use them and it's a huge pain. At least C# to VB is an easier translation but I really wish it came with VB to begin with.

I'm not sure what 'new' starter kits i'd want, but i think each level of visual studio should have all the features and stuff of the one before, plus more. So each 'full' visual studio should have everything that is available for express, plus the extras that place it at that level. Visual studio full should have all teh express starters, plus others.

My 2 cents.

Yes, include 'em. I'd use it!

I'm all with Steve Hiner. I code for $ as well as for fun. I want my Starter Kit, god damn it!

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