When evaluating Visual Studio 2010, should you install the Ultimate version, or the version you think your company is most likely to purchase?

Question

I want to install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and I see several versions - seems they've gone a little nuts with the versions this time around so there's "Professional", "Premium" and "Ultimate".

When it comes to Visual Studio 2008 we went with the Professional edition. I'm not privy to the reasoning but it serves our needs.

On the one hand I figure I should evaluate the Professional edition of Visual Studio 2010 since there's a good chance that's what I'll be using when the thing ships next year. On the other hand, I wonder if I should evaluate the Ultimate version so I can figure out what if any features it has which I could use.

When evaluating Visual Studio 2010, should you install the Ultimate version, or the version you think your company is most likely to purchase?

Answer 1

Why not evaluate all available, and thus determine what's suitable for your project/company ?

Answer 2

If Ultimate has features that you might like, and you stand a chance of up-selling to it, and you don't have bandwidth constraints go for it.

Myself I'm currently d/l Professional, as I fail all the above tests.

Answer 3

It depends on how likely it is that you could convince them of buying any particular version. If there's no chance they'll buy a more featureful product, you're just going to make yourself unhappy when you have to switch off the beta to a lower product. If you think you can convince them to buy any product that has features you find compelling, try out the top tier Ulitmate version, and then decide what you'll recommend to the company based on which cheapest edition had the features you liked from it.

Answer 4

The new features of VS2010 are so much more powerful than you might expect, that I strongly recommend evaluating the Ultimate version. It may very well be the case that an organization which would never have spent the money for VS2008 Team Architecture edition might be so impressed by the new Architecture-level features of VS2010, that they may decide to buy a single Ultimate license for 2010.