Visual studio Express 2013 OR Visual studio Pro 2010

Question

I have a business laptop and have these two options mentioned in the title; cost is not a limitation (company licence) and I will be developing simple GUI/console programs.

Currently I'm using Code::Blocks , but ran into the situation where I had to use the WtsApi32 for WTSRegisterSessionNotification . I'm struck with the requirement for using Sal.h , which comes with MS Visual Studio - I'm thinking of using MS VC++ for this specific application which needs to find out if the current user (multi-monitor setup) has locked his laptop/PC or not.

I need to install either the MS VS Pro 2010 or the MS VS 2013 Express edition - what are the pros and cons between these two?

What is your suggestion?

Answer 1

Visual Studio Pro 2010 has resource editor and I think also profiler support, but the help system sucks big time (this was the edition where they modernized it, in an associative way) and the compiler, Visual C++, lacks nearly all C++11 features. I used a 3rd party help viewer with VS 2010. However, it was a bit crash prone and generally erratic.

2013 Express Edition lacks a resource editor and GUI for profiler, but has a decent help viewer (they had to give up on the everything-is-web silliness) and more up-to-date compiler which essentially only lacks C++11 constexpr in order to be good.

Both are huge downloads.