Any use with Microsoft Express products?

I've just downloaded and installed LightSpeed Express.  I'm eager to use it with SQLite.  However, when right-clicking on a project in Visual Web Developer 2k8 Express or Visual Basic 2k8 Express and selecting "Add New Item," none of the LightSpeed templates are visible.  I assumed that this products could be used with the Microsoft Express family of products, but I could be wrong. 

My question is, can LightSpeed be used with the Microsoft Express family of products?  If so, then what have I done wrong?  What steps can I take to solve the problem of missing templates?

Thanks,

Shawn

You can use the LightSpeed runtime -- the core O/R mapper and LINQ provider -- with Visual Studio Express, but not the designer.

The reason is that Microsoft specifically prevent the Express editions from loading extensions such as the LightSpeed designer -- only Standard edition and above will host these products.  We wish this weren't the case, but this is outside our control.

You can still use the LightSpeed runtime, but you will need to write your classes by hand in Visual Basic.  The samples and documentation describe how to do this (they are mostly written in C# but hopefully they will translate easily -- if not just let us know what you're not sure about).  You can also use the lsgen.exe command-line to generate classes for you directly from a database, e.g.

lsgen /p:Sqlite3 /c:"Data Source=mydb.db3" /l:vb /n:MyApp.Model /o:ModelFiles /linq

(See Help Topics > Modelling Tools > Command Line Tool for more info, or run lsgen without any switches to see the full list of options.)

Due to the way VS Express installs itself it is possible lsgen.exe may not be installed on your system (it is part of the designer component) -- if you don't have Tools / Designer folder let us know and we'll see what we can do, or if your model is reasonably small then I can provide some Visual Studio snippets that make it easy to write the classes by hand.