Hi there,
This may have been an issue to do with the version of Visual Studio you downloaded, there are two express versions one for Windows and the other for Windows Desktop, the one you need is the desktop version (the other is meant for the windows store).
However just the other day they introduced a new Community version of Visual Studio which is equivalent to the Pro version, but free to use if you are an individual developer (or a team of 5 or less) and your game makes less than $1 million per year.
You can find the download link from here, I would recommend giving it a try as it has more features including the ability to use plugins, and is a huge improvement over the express version in my opinion.
Hope that helps fix your issue! 