Tuesday, June 12, 2012: Microsoft's announcement that Visual Studio development Software will only develop Metro applications, and will not support desktop-style applications came as a closed call for the open source aficionados. But, taking a sudden U-turn, Microsoft has induced the news of a free-of-charge Windows Desktop version of the software, renamed as Visual Studio Express 2012 for the desktop-style environments. S Somasegar, corporate vice president, Microsoft's developer division, said: "We heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level."
"Today, I'm happy to announce that we will add Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop to the Visual Studio 2012 family. This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we've made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications," Somasegar added.

Now this comes as a great news for those who want to develop desktops apps for the upcoming Windows 8 using the free version of Visual Studio.

Somasegar said that developers, now, will be able to use C++, C# or Visual Basic with latest compilers and programming tools along with integrated testing unit and ability to collaborate via Team Explorer and TFS Express, to develop Windows desktop and console applications.

After Windows Azure cloud computing service, Microsoft seems to have opened arms for Linux and open source with the latest Visual Studio treat.