Visual Studio: why do you use the specific edition that you do?

Question

I work at a web development company, so our aim is ASP.NET and IIS. Currently we use a mix of Visual Studio Web Developer 2008 SP1 and Visual Studio Standard Edition 2005, and we're about to purchase the same edition for all development teams. We work in teams from 3 to 8 developers per team.

Looking at the feature matrix of Visual Studio products I can see quite some features that I don't even know what they do, or have 3rd party alternatives (like NUnit vs MSTest). If you've got a second, could you please post what edition of Visual Studio you or your company uses, and what the main reason(s) are?

Update:

We're not really trying to choose between 2005 or 2008, but it's the standard/pro/team suite differences and benefits of each edition that we're trying to get a grip on.

Answer 1

VS2008 is a major productivity boost over VS2005 with intellisense everywhere even in javascript.

Answer 2

All else being equal, I'd go for the latest and greatest, because they are always (read: usually) backwards compatible.

However, much more depends on your development guidelines. Are you flexible and able to move with the times, or do you like to periodically review your approach and define standard platforms and approaches?

If you are developing in .NET, you probably ought to be using v2 and above. However the need for v3.5 is less pressing. I like it, but it is an incremental enhancement, rather than a new platform. There are lots of nice things in 2008, but if you have heavily invested in 2005, it wouldn't be 'wrong' to stick with that for a few more years.

Are there specific issues or features that drive you towards either 2005 or 2008?

Answer 3

The main question is weather you plan to do the Framework 3.5 development. If so the obvious chaise is VS2008. If you want to do only the Framework 2.0/3.0 development you are quite good with VS2005.

Note: with VS2008 you are able to do the Framework 2.0, 3.0 3.5 development.

Answer 4

Visual Studio 2008 (2005) for Team Developers. Main reasons for this are integration with TFS and Testing tools.

Answer 5

There is also some clear information about the different editions of Microsoft Visual Studio on Wikipedia.

Answer 6

We use Visual Studio Team 2008, developers edition, at work. We're developing WPF and needed a sourcecontrol. At home I've use VS2008 Professional, I don't need all the extra tools there.