Yup. That's right. You've probably seen it elsewhere, but I've got a different spin on this whole free thing.

First the news: All of the Visual Studio Express editions (Web Developer, C# Express, VB Express, C++ Express, J# Express,?and SQL Express) are all free for one year. And it's not a one year trial - if you download it in the next year, it'll be free forever. That's awesome!

Why is it awesome? Well, it blows away the barriers to entry for .NET development. That's good for me in two ways. First, as a consultant, any time that more people have access to the technology I specialize in, that means more work for me. And no, I'm not really worried about it taking away business.

It's also good for me as an owner of Tourney Logic. Why? Well, we're developing (actually, Brian is) a tournament management app on top of the Club Site, and we'll be able to publish that for anyone to use, and with the tools to use it being free, that only helps.

By the way, on the Tourney Logic front, Brian published our Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 beta quick starts, where you can start to see how easy it's going to be to configure brackets in the future. You can't see the code yet, but Brian has a nice post laying out what your code would look like to create the quickstarts. He's also working on getting the code downloadable, and tomorrow, we're putting together a "Channel 9 Style" video that'll show how easy it really is!

For me, I'm knee deep in double elimination. It'll be there, that much I know!