There's now a free version of Visual Studio 2012 which allows opening mixed-language solution files. This means it should now be possible to build the desktop version of Quest without having to use one of the paid-for versions of Visual Studio.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/ar ... -here.aspx

Anybody want to give this a try and let me know if it works?

I will give it a go over the weekend. Is there anything special I will need to do, or does Quest just open as a project?

You should be able to simply open the .sln file.

It will complain about the projects it doesn't support (definitely the Setup project, likely all the web projects too) but it should be able to build enough for you to build and start the Quest project.

I've not tried it myself though.

It is an evaluation trial only, and it lasts only a month, and you have to register with MS to get a serial number to get it to work.
It does not support Setup, Webeditor, webplayer (as you guessed).

But it does open the other projects, and I did do a "Rebuild solution", which reported completing successfully.

Excellent!

Registering for the serial number should be free by the way, although looking at the comments on that blog post, who knows where you actually go to get one.

just fired it up again, and it is not now asking for a serial number or saying it is only for evaluation, so it seems to be good-to-go.

Yipiiee, VS2012Express is running on my PC. Managed to load the project

VS Express 2012 can't open the WebEditor and the WebPlayer. How can I edit it?

The Visual Studio Express version I linked to is for Windows desktop apps, so I suppose it won't work for ASP.NET projects.

There is an Express version "for Web" though http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/e ... xpress-web

It's possible to convert the c# (asp.net) webplayer in html5?