Microsoft has made its Visual Studio 2010 Express versions available for download. The software giant made beta 2 of the Visual Studio 2010 Express editions available for download on Oct. 21.

Microsoft began offering this week Beta 2 releases of its free Visual Studio 2010 Express products, which are intended to enable students, hobbyists, and novices to build Windows and Web applications.

Microsoft will ship a version of its Visual Studio Express 2012 for building Windows desktop applications, reversing an earlier decision to limit the Express version of the toolkit to building ...