Visual Studio Standard and Service Templates

[AveryH]

Can your Microsoft guru please explain the rationale behind not providing a Service Template in the Standard Editions of Visual Studio?

I'm sure that I am not the only person who doesn't need all of the extra bells and whistles included in "higher" versions but who do, occasionally, have neeed of such a template.

[briankel]

This is a tradeoff based on market research of the type of person who usually buys the Standard SKU. I wasn't on the team that made that decision but I know that our research showed us that this type of person doesn't usually need to author Services, so we didn't include it in there for sake of simplifying the SKU. For the "advanced" user who does need to author Services, it shouldn't be too hard to find the template code to get started.

Of course, those decisions aren't always going to please 100% of the people who buy the product - such as yourself. But since we no longer offer a Standard SKU of Visual Studio it's probably no longer worth debating. :-)

Brian