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answers:

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I know this is somewhat subjective, but I can't find an honest answer anywhere. Everything concerning VS2010 are Microsoft marketing materials.

Our small group is going to upgrade to VS2010(mostly for F# and the new threading features), but we can't decide between the Professional and Premium versions. The integrated testing features in Premium sound good, but I can' figure out if they're worth the 10x increase in cost between the two versions(Professional is ~549, Premium is ~5400).

Has anyone been faced with a similar decision? What swayed you one way or the other?

+12  A: 

I haven't faced a similar situation yet (I'm going to have to eventually), but I can tell you what the difference is (hence the price jump).


Professional

Will get you pretty much what Professional gets you now. You can develop everything you need to and do basic debugging (which is what you probably do now).


Premium

Premium adds in a couple features that aren't found in Professional. You get Static Code Analysis, Code Metrics, Profiling, some Testing tools, and read-only diagram support.

The value add here comes if you're working on a medium sized team. You get the benefit of built in debugging/analysis/testing tools along with the ability to view architecture diagrams built by somebody running Ultimate.

If that sounds like you, then it'd be worth it.

Personally, it's Ultimate that I really want.


Ultimate

The closest analog to Ultimate is Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition. It gives you Premium plus a whole ton of Architecture, Testing, and Management tools. The real benefits that I see in Ultimate is that you get IntelliTrace and the Architecture Tools.

If you're working on a large application in a large team, IntelliTrace could be worth the money alone. It allows your testers to run their tests against a debug version of the application. IntelliTrace will then record the actions (even video of the UI if you want) and the Stack Trace of the entire run of the application.

After the recording happens, you as a developer can go back and reply the entire run...viewing the Stack Trace as you go. That allows you to look in to the application and see EXACTLY what was happening when the tester was running your application which means...

No more developers saying "Can Not Reproduce..."!

As for the Architecture tools, you finally have the ability to create Architecture diagrams (Class and Sequence diagrams were used heavily in the demo I saw) and generate your code from the diagrams.

You also get the ability to reverse engineer code back into UML diagrams. This may not sound exciting, but there's another feature that makes it all worth it which is...

The best thing that I saw with the Architecture tools, is the ability to define Architecure rules while you're desiging your diagrams. Once those rules are defined, you can make the part of the build process. Visual Studio will then validate the code against the diagrams each time a build happens. If a developer writes code that violates your architecture rules, BAM! no build.

...Sweet stuff in my opinion.

Justin Niessner
Ain't Ultimate the one that replaces Team Edition? though I read that somewhere this morning. IntelliTrace is an Ultimate only feature according to their comparison.
cyberzed
ultimate also gets you some number of seats, and a tfs license
DevelopingChris
Doh! Misread the question. You're right. I'm talking about features in Ultimate.
Justin Niessner
I sooo wish that Ultimate would be cheaper but I'll probably hit Professional/Premium...funded by my first part time project :) at work we are most likely ending at Premium edition at some point when we move from 2008.
cyberzed
@cyberzed If you already have an MSDN agreement for Visual Studio 2008 Professional fo your developers, you get Visual Studio 2010 Premium for a year. At least I think that was the upgrade path they told me...
Justin Niessner
No worries about the Ultimate issue.
Jonathan Beerhalter
@Justin, sweet...just a shame we probably won't be movin' on until autumn or maybe later (and hopefully we'll shoot WinXP at the same time) :D
cyberzed
How many of the Ultimate features work for C++?
Ben
+2  A: 

You could integrate testing into your workflow by just adding resharper and using nUnit and by also creating a build script and using a build server like CruiseControl.Net or TeamCity or Hudson.

This would only be a fraction of the price too.

mendicant
You aren't counting for the price of pain. After all... you could just to notepad and csc.exe (or vbc.exe)
Matthew Whited
Pain in setting up TeamCity is pretty minimal. I was a skeptic at first, but you get a lot of bang for the buck. Setting up my nant build script took about 2 hours when I had pretty much zero nant experience. After that, TeamCity does a nice job of presenting build results, linking to build artifacts, and showing unit test results and performance histories of those tests. I think this is a great option for a small team on a budget.
Chris Farmer
The monetary cost for TeamCity is zero if you have 20 or fewer developers, too.
Chris Farmer
you don't need to use nUnit, because all 3 VS versions: Professional, Premium and Ultimate include MSTest.
Dragan Panjkov
Well, if we're going to get into the pain argument then MSTest is out the window :) But you're right Matthew, you need to find the balance of what is painful for you and what actually works for you. It's a high initial pain to set up many of these things, but I find the long term value far outweighs the initial cost.
mendicant
A: 

I got the Ultimate edition and I am very happy with it.

CodeToGlory
I love your enthusiasm, but I think that WindyCityEagle is actually more interested in why you have chosen the Ultimate edition.
Rob van Groenewoud
Exactly Rob. I'm sure its awesome, but I need to sell this to the people that write the checks.
Jonathan Beerhalter
I am working on a legacy code base and having the ability to generate sequence diagrams was enough to make me buy it.
CodeToGlory