Friday Freebies update from July 2005

That's right, it's plural this week cause I have more than one freebie for you. The first freebie is from an unlikely source. Microsoft is finally joining the rest of the world and offering up an express edition of Visual Studio for free (as in gratis). Express editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server are available for download now (in beta) and are expected to be fully released in November with the general availability of SQL Server 2005. Both products will be optimized for running on the average desktop.The second Friday Freebie is from ThinkFree. ThinkFree is offering a free service that lets users create, access and edit any Word, Excel or PowerPoitn file without requiring client side software. The free service includes 30 MB of storage, blog embedding and PDF creation.Users can purchase additional storage and services, but the core office applications will remain free.