VS2010 Upgrade Edition - is 'upgrading' from express ligitimate?

Question

I've read from a non reliable source that purchasing VS2010 Upgrade Edition (As opposed to full retail) is a valid licensing route when 'upgrading' from VS Express (free) - Can anyone confirm or refute this?

Thank you

Answer 1

It looks like this is true:

Before you buy

Eligible for upgrade with any previous version of Visual Studio or any other developer tool.

Visual Studio 2010 Professional includes a 12-month MSDN Essentials subscription. MSDN Essentials gives you access to core Microsoft platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Datacenter R2.

Special information for trial users If you're using a trial version of Visual Studio Professional and you buy the Visual Studio 2010 Professional Upgrade, you can use the product key you get on the receipt page to convert your trial version to a full version.

This seems to say that you can upgrade from any competing product or any existing version of Visual Studio, even a trial one. It doesn't explicitly mention the Express edition, but you could always install the trial version and upgrade that instead.