First, thank you for your message.

I do work on a serious project and I agree that I should (and will) purchase the VS Professional upgrade. Especially since it includes the support for LESS. The only thing I am not sure is if I will be able to use LESS on my public (DiscountASP.net) site, preprocessing on the server (I believe using dotless). But if not, at least, LESS has an option of preprocessing on the client (using less.js), even though, I believe that preprocessing on the server is more efficient.

>VS 2013 is out now and you probably should use VS 2013 Express. The full versions of VS 2013 include LESS support natively so you no longer need Web Essentials for the auto-compile features. I believe script compression is also included in the base version but it's hard to tell for me what's in WE and what's native. I know LESS has been integrated though for sure.
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>I know that's the case for the full versions, but not sure what exactly is or isn't in the Express versions, but might be worth a check. IAC VS2013 adds a bunch of improvements to the various HTML/CSS/JS editors that'll make an update worthwhile no matter what as well as being a bit snappier. And it works with VS2010 and 2012 projects as is.
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>FWIW, if you use VS for any serious work it's probably worth to invest in a full version of Pro and in some extra tooling like Resharper or CodeRush. If you have *any* previous version of Visual Studio you can upgrade in the Microsoft store for $99 until the end of January.
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>http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Visual-Studio-Professional-2013/productID.284832200
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>+++ Rick ---
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>>I would like to start using Less CSS pre-compiler (after reading about it online). But then I read that in order to use Less with VS 2012 you need to install Web Essentials 2012. And then I read (in comments) that Web Essentials will not work with VS 2012 Web Express (which I have). Can I still use LESS without Web Essentials?
>>TIA