Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio 2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net Framework is ready for release and as such as announced the final (non-beta) versions of the Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions (click link for downloads).

The Express Editions of Visual Studio is something that Microsoft did right.  By releasing a fully functional development environment for free and that allows people to release their products commercially is a great way to get people utilizing your products.  I think they partially did this to compete with SharpDevelop, a free open source DotNet IDE.  However, the fact that I can legally download a version of Visual Studio to my home PC to develop with is absolutely awesome, this way I do not need to find a version a P2P site to install and use.