Microsoft — Visual Web Developer 2010 Express [upd]

I was digging through an old external drive today and found a backup of a project I built over 15 years ago using . It hit me just how much web development has changed — and how much I actually miss that era.

April 14, 2026

#RetroDev #ASP.NET #WebForms #VisualStudio2010 microsoft visual web developer 2010 express

Microsoft officially ended support for Visual Web Developer 2010 Express years ago, and ASP.NET Web Forms is in maintenance mode. But for many of us, VWD 2010 was our first real introduction to professional web dev without paying $1,000 for a license. If you’re a younger dev and you’ve never seen it, try spinning up a VM with Windows 7 and installing VWD 2010 Express (you can still find the ISO on archive.org). Build a simple GridView with paging and editing. You’ll understand where modern tools like Blazor got their inspiration. I was digging through an old external drive

Before layout components in React or Angular, we had Master Pages. Define your site header and footer once, and every content page just inherited the layout. It felt revolutionary. But for many of us, VWD 2010 was

There was no IIS Express yet. VWD 2010 came with its own lightweight development web server. Pressing F5 just worked . It wasn’t the fastest, but it was dead simple.