Which Visual Studio 2010 edition for sole developer

Question

I am the sole .net developer for a small company. My projects span many .net technologies including WinForms, WPF, SQL, XNA, Linq, WCF, WTF?, and others.

I struggle staying on top of all these projects so I'm looking to make my life easier with the release of VS2010. Without a mentor I rely heavily on StackOverflow and whatever else Google comes up with. Should I convince my company to get an edition with an MSDN subscription? Is it one of those things where once you have it, you can't imagine life without it?

What about the source control that comes with VS2010, do you all find it better than an SVN server?

We're looking to hire another programmer this year, would I be best off getting a Team edition of VS2010 to be best prepared for that hire?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want "Intellitrace" (aka "historical debugging") you'll need Ultimate.

Similarly Premium and Professional incrementally have fewer features. Any other these, or some combination could be the deciding factor. There is a comparison on the product pages.

Also, consider the value of an MSDN Subscription, getting you access to OSs, servers and tools for development and test (and one instance of Office for general use).

Even as a sole developer you should still be using source control (unless it is VSS :-)), whether SVN, GIT, TFS, ... all the paid editions will give you integration. ALM (application lifecycle management) like TFS will do source code control (SCM or VCS) as well as work item tracking (defects, feastrues) and much more. VS paid editions + MSDN include TFS (and you can run it on a Workstation -- server OS only no longer).

In my opinion if you are being employed professionally as a developer in the MS platform, VS Pro + MSDN is a minimum (otherwise ask yourself about the standard of employment), and really it should be VS Ultimate + MSDN. Compare the cost of employing you with the cost of the subscription (especially once on a VL program -- and you only need a single MSDN subscription to qualify for VL).

Answer 2

Visual Studio is a great product and I use it daily. Our level of MSDN subscription is Premium. This opens most of the doors in the MSDN library and I can't say I'm missing Ultimate. When Visual Studio was still RC and Beta we were developing in it (Ultimate) and things like IntelliTrace were nice to have features but were definitely not make or break.

I would advise against getting Visual Studio Premium because it is lacking in some of the features that I use extensively such as Code Coverage and static code analysis.

I'd have to say I can't imagine life without an MSDN subscription. It would be impossible to develop (and test) on the range of platforms necessary.

As for the source repositories we have been using TFS 2010 for the last few months and found that the seamless integration with Visual Studio is the huge selling point. The ability to check-in and out is only one aspect of the system. The ability to create build definitions, view build history and manage work items, all through the IDE, saves so much time.

If price becomes a problem there are always alternatives to Microsoft. If you want to use SVN there are SVN plugins such as VisualSVN and ankhsvn. You could then use something like CruiseControl.Net for builds.

Answer 3

Working as a single developer or in a small team I've usually found that any version of VS (except for Express) is ok, the Ultimate version do have some interesting things, but not anything essential for many developers.

I'd suggest that you (or your boss) look at the Microsoft Action Pack. They've got a new one for developers where you'll get 3 VS Pro licenses plus a bunch of OS and Server licenses (some of them only for development but some of them are valid for any employee I think).

In England it seems to be about £290 per year with the 15% discount that's on right now, so very cheap for what you get. There are some requirements, but if you develop software using MS Software you probably have a fairly high chance of qualifying:

https://partner.microsoft.com/40132997