Our friends over at Microsoft have a knack for hiding really cool stuff right under our noses, and they certainly didn't deviate from this policy with their Visual Studio Express Edition line of products. Included with the programming and database tools that would make the layman cringe is an interesting gem called Visual Web Developer Express Edition.

While the other Express Edition products focus on programming and application development, Visual Web Developer provides a hybrid set of tools; its versatile HTML and CSS editing tools are paired with the power of ASP.NET to allow users to quickly build web applications. However, what a lot of people don't know about Visual Web Developer is that the ASP.NET development tools can be ignored, turning it into a very impressive website editor.

Visual Web Developer includes Visual Studio's powerful WYSIWYG page editor and CSS style builder functions. Also provided is Microsoft's developer sanity-preserving IntelliSense technology, which makes editing HTML and CSS a breeze by providing immediate access to things like common markup and style attributes and values. However, one of our favorite features of Visual Web Developer is that you can point it to an FTP server, and edit your website right on your web server without worrying about uploading changes or using a separate FTP client. In fact, Visual Web Developer can, for the most part, replace your external FTP client, because the Solution Explorer allows you to upload and manipulate files right in your editing environment.

All of the Visual Studio Express Editions are free of charge; they don't do quite as much as Visual Studio, but they are worth looking at if you're interested in getting started with software or web development.