which Visual Studio level to buy?

Question

I currently have Visual Studio 2008 Developer Edition. I wish to renew this and get the 3 year SA. However the cost is crazy (around 6-7K USD). The only things that I require above and beyond what Visual Studio Professional Edition used to have are access to TFS (Team Foundation Server) and the ability to create and run Test projects (especially the ability to generate the stubs for unit testing private methods).

Therefore is it true that Visual Studio Professional plus a separate purchase of a TFS CAL will do exactly this for me?

Answer 1

Yes, those two will fill your technical requirements but I'm no licensing expert so I'm not going to say that its all you'll need from a licensing perspective.

In case you haven't seen there’s a document which describes the features of all the different SKUs at Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison Guide

---

UPDATE:

There's a paper about licensing at Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper

Answer 2

If you are an ISV (independent solution vendor) you might look at the BizSpark program. If you qualify software licensing becomes a great deal simpler for the next three years. ($300)

Hope that helps,

Dan

BizSpark

Answer 3

Visual Studio professional does not contain the full suite of automated Testing tools provided in Team Suite editions so you can't really do TDD (if that's your aim) without additional tools.

You can however create and run Test Projects so they are at last available if you can find an alternative test generation tool or are working with a solution with tests already in it.