Should I get Visual Studio 2008 or skip it for 2010 beta?

Question

I have been running Visual Studio 2005 on a Windows 2003 Server VM for the last few years and I just got a Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Professional subscription ($300 off!).

I plan to setup a Windows 2008 Server VM to do my primary development on and I was wondering whether I should get Visual Studio 2008, or because I've never used it, skip ahead to the 2010 beta?

Edit

In VS 2005 I primarily use C# and basic web forms ASP.net. I'm hoping to start upgrading some of those projects but may have to hold back if other people who I collaborate with don't upgrade.

Answer 1

I would opt for 2008 over 2010 beta. The former has a service pack released, and several other hotfixes, so a lot of the kinks have been worked out. The latter is at beta quality (which means there's plenty of small issues wrong with it, and maybe a couple big ones) and has not had very much performance tuning at all. Also, I find that upgrading from a beta of Visual Studio to a later release can be painful (it has been in the past), so I would try to avoid that unless the VM is easily replaced.

Alternatively, you could set up your Server 2008 VM and 2010 beta without activating Windows and you can decide if 2010 is good enough for you. (I forget if the Windows activation timespan is long enough to make this feasible.) If you don't like it, you can go back to 2008. If you do like it, you can still install 2008 and compare between the two.

Answer 2

Well, how happy are you to wait, and how happy are you to use the beta in the interim? What language are you using? VS2005 won't let you use C# 3.0 features, for example - which is a big thing IMO, as the C# 3 features are lovely :)

EDIT: Visual Studio 2010 now has a release date of March 22nd 2010. Beta 2 is now out, and it seems somewhat snappier to me - but I haven't used it in anger yet.

Answer 3

This is a tough one.

Things to consider and help you decide:

• With VS 2010 you'll also get .Net 4.0 which may not be desired (- or +)
• If you use add-ins they may not be supported (-)
• You'll get richer functionality (+)
• Stability (--)

That's just from the top of my head. Others may tell you even better if they used it already.

Answer 4

I think you should go for 2008. MS really struck gold on this product IMO and I have a feeling it will be awhile before they do it again. Studio 2003 was extremely buggy, 2005 was even worse... I've been really surprised with how few issues I've had with 2008. I used it for 6 months before it crashed on me and I think that was my own fault. (Kind of did some naughty stuff with threads.)

I have a hard time believing they'll be able to do so well again this quickly so I'm not holding my breath for 2010.

Answer 5

If you plan on developing professionally you should use stable technologies, unless for some reason you need to use the newest feature that was just released.

Using a beta software means you may have to find workarounds for bugs in the software (heck, it even happens with stable release...). Worse, you can code based on a specific behavior in beta 1, and then on beta X you will notice they changed something and it doesn't behave in the same way anymore.

You don't seem to have specifics requirements (since you don't mention them in your post), so you probably don't need visual 2010.