I left the .Net world about 3 years ago. There were plenty of things to complain about, but licensing was never one of them. Most of the stack is free until you get to the point where you should be able to pay for it anyway.
2. Click on the Products menu
3. Click on Express 2012 products
4. There is no step 4
To get the other software free, you need to sign up for BizSpark (which requires jumping through a few hoops). http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
The express apps should be sufficient for building apps (I'm using them for a desktop app right now) and should allow you to learn the Microsoft stack with minimal effort.
The Express products are completely functional although they lack certain non essential features. The main limitation of the Express editions is that you can't use third party plugins with them. Third party plugins are used to enhance Visual Studio itself and are not to be confused with third party libraries which you can download conventionally or with the built in package manager Nuget.
The Express editions are distributed by task so you only download what you need. If you don't want to create Windows Phone apps, for example, you don't have to download that functionality.
To develop web apps you have to download Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-st...
It allows you to develop ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms apps with C# or VB.NET right out of the box but you can also use it to develop web services with WebAPI, regular HTML5 websites, etc. And out of the box you can deploy by using FTP, WebDeploy and Azure but you can also use whatever external tool that you like.
The product includes a copy of MS SQL Express that runs as a process but you're not limited to using Microsoft databases.
Oh, no, you're definitely right about that. What I meant was weird was that nobody seemed to describe it in those terms, so I was looking for the wrong thing.
Thanks for the rundown! Now that I actually have some idea what I'm doing, I'll have to give it another go once I get a bit of free time.
Wait until your operation gets bigger and requires monitoring and all the goodies specifically for IIS/Windows Server.