Does Visual Studio 2013 Express support the Class Designer feature?

Question

Attempting to learn C# .NET etc self study. I have subscribed to LearnNowOnline and one of the courses has a Lab module that shows the tutor using Class Designer to view a Class Diagram. Does the Express version have the Class Designer feature? Where can I find details about the difference between the free and paid versions?

I am using VS 2013 Express (Desktop) and the directions on "How to add class diagrams..." as documented on MSDN.

1) In Solution Explorer, right-click the project name. Then choose Add New Item or Add, New Item.

2) Under Templates, choose Class Diagram. I don't even see a Templates selection item. For Visual C++ projects, look under Templates, and then under Utility to find this template.

3)The class diagram opens in Class Designer and appears as a file that has a .cd extension in Solution Explorer in the project hierarchy. Use the Class Designer toolbox to drag shapes and lines to the diagram.

The lab solution has a .cd file and when I click and view this .cd file the window shows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ClassDiagram MajorVersion="1" MinorVersion="1">
  <Font Name="Tahoma" Size="8.25" />
  <Class Name="ClassesLabCompleted.LogFile" Collapsed="true">
    <Position X="0.5" Y="0.5" Width="1.5" />
    <TypeIdentifier>
      <FileName>LogFile.cs</FileName>
      <HashCode>AAAAAAAAgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACQAAAgAAABAAAA=</HashCode>
    </TypeIdentifier>
  </Class>
</ClassDiagram>

No pretty UI like in the tutorial's video. Further, I have no right click context menu selection to "View Class Diagram"

If Visual Studio 2013 Express supports this feature, how do I access it?

Answer 1

This is a Visual Studio Professional or better feature. Express doesn't have the Code Visualization and class Designer features (nor any of the other UML features).

As far as I can tell there is no official feature comparison for Visual Studio that includes the Express editions. But there is a blog post that describes the 2012 features and they have remained almost identical with the upgrade to 2013.

The 2013 feature comparison for the other editions can be found here.

---

UPDATE

Now that the Visual Studio Community Edition is available, you may be able to use that instead of Express. It depends on whether you fall in the license category for the Community Edition:

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?

A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

^Source