• Game Studio Express 1.0 or 1.0 Refresh works ONLY with Visual C# Express 2005. See the Readme file http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937796.aspx
• Game Studio 2.0 supports all Visual Studio 2005 SKUs. However only C# is fully supported with the IDE enhancements.
• Neither Game Studio Express 1.0 or Game Studio 2.0 supports and Visual Studio 2008 sku. The release of Game Studio 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008 did not align well enough that the GS team had enough time to implement and test. If they had have done this is would have caused other features to drop. There is no announced time frame for it to be supported. In general questions about the future of XNA can be best summarized by this FAQ 'When will XNA Game Studio Express support {my favourite feature}'
• Game Studio 3.0 will support all Visual Studio 2008 skus ONLY, VS05 will not be supported. There has been no announcement on other languages besides C#. (See GS 3.0 FAQ)

However there are some unsupported workarounds...You can use the assemblies as references from any Visual Studio product or language but you will not get the use of the starter kits, the content pipeline, or the deployment to the xbox.

See this article for some do's and dont's to make XNA work with VS2008

Note there is a compatibility bug in VS08 which prevents using MSBuild with the XNA custom MSBuild components

C# Express shares many files with Visual Studio so the install does not add much of a foot print to your hard disc usage and its fully supported side by side.

VS2005 and VS2008 also live happily side by side.

The XNA Game Studio Express team are looking into supporting other Visual Studio versions and languages in the future. You can express your desires at http://connect.microsoft.com