How to get VisualStudio 2010 cool tools without spending $12,000

Question

We are a small dev shop with 10 people, 3 of whom are currently doing .Net. The new VisualStudio 2010 tools look really nice, and we would like to use them - but it seems that many of them (historical debugging, UML tools, testing stuff) are only going to be available in the Ultimate Edition. And that costs $12,000. Or nearly forty grand for the three of us. (See here for details).

Given that the architectural visualisation tools seem to be lifted straight from NDepend, which cost around €250 each (and is excellent), we just can't justify that sort of spending.

Now, we have a normal MSDN professional subscription, but that only got us one VS Team System, and I assume will not get us three 2010 Ultimates. Given that we have no use for the whole Team Foundation Server stuff, and just want the dev tools, what can we do?

EDIT:

Here is a list of the dev tools (leaving database and "testing lab" tools for another question) which are missing from the "Professional" version. An asterisk (*) means that the feature is in the "Premium" edition, no asterisk means only available in "Ultimate". What are the non-multi-thousand-dollar alternatives?

• Testing:

  Code Coverage (*)

  Test Impact Analysis (*)

  Coded UI Test (*)

  Web Performance Testing

  Load Testing

• Debugging & Diagnostics:

  Static Code Analysis (*)

  Code Metrics (*)

  Profiling (*)

  IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)

• Architecture and Modeling:

  UML & Layer diagram viewer (*)

  Architecture Explorer

  UML 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)

  Layer Diagram and Dependency Validation

Answer 1

Either you need the tools aand they'll pay for themselves in productivity. Or they are a would like to have. If the latter then you should consider what you absolute requirements are and start from there.

Besides 2010 isn't out yet so you have time to evaluate other solutions.

Answer 2

1) do without

2) find alternatives

3) lobby MS (you probably won't be alone in this) for standalone versions

You can't always get the tools you want at the price you want. We're in a similar boat :(

Answer 3

Like you've said, some of the tools are just copies of other tools that are already available in the market. If I were in your position I'd be looking at getting a version of Visual Studio that's covers all the basics a professional .net developer needs and then look at alternative tools. There are heaps of great open source and commercial tools that do an excellent job for free or for a reasonable price.

The best part about third party tools, in my opinion, is that they tend to be able to improve and adapt quicker than the standard Visual Studio release cycle. Things like continuous integration servers, unit testing frameworks, mocking/isolation frameworks, source control etc are often best done by third party tools so that as things change in the industry you can adapt your tools without having to wait for Microsoft.

Answer 4

You probably don't need three seats, get one and share it for the toys? I'm guessing that the entire team doesn't need to worry about architectural visualisation every day of course...

If you're really tight you could make the poor sods use Express most of the time as well.. ;)

Answer 5

Look at volume licensing: It is cheaper for even one VS/MSDN licence, so should save significantly for three.

Get VS 2008 Team Edition (e.g. Developer) with MSDN Premium today, and take advantage of the automatic upgrade to VS2010 Ultimate on its release. Removed: offer applied before the VS2010 release.

Answer 6

Don't know if it applies to your case, but have you checked the new Microsoft WebSiteSpark program?

Answer 7

use SharpDevelop and hope that they will implement those features as soon as possible...

Answer 8

If you're a small dev shop, Microsoft will give you the full version of VS (and then some) for a few years. Check out the BizSpark program.

Answer 9

To start off the alternatives, as mentioned above: NDepend is an excellent alternative to the Architecture Explorer, though missing some of the integration into VS. It also provides Code Metrics (dozens of them!) and static code analysis, including flagging dependency cycles etc etc.

Costs around €250 for the full version; there is a free academic/trial version.

Answer 10

Here's how to do it.... if you upgrade to an MSDN premium subscription and you currently have VS.NET 2008 professional and/or 2008 TS before March 22nd 2010 you will get ultimate upgrade for FREE. My source is the following article

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19/visual%5Fstudio%5F2010%5Fsecond%5Fbeta%5Fpackaging/

Edit: The info is located near the end of the article. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me!

Answer 11

You can try NDepend that comes with

• Dependency Graph,
• Dependency Matrix,
• Flexible ways to write rules on code,
• possibility to diff 2 versions of the code,
• 82 code metrics

and much more, see the list of NDepend features here.

NDepend cost a few hundreds buck, and contrary to the 12K US$ VS 2010 Ultimate cost, it can scale up to analyze the largest .NET applications, made of millions of lines of code.

You can try NDepend straight on your code thanks to a Free Trial Edition.