Customer Reviews

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional with MSDN Premium Renewal [Old Version]

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VS 2008 is Microsoft's best development environment yet, incorporating support and tools for all the new technologies introduced since VS 2005, including ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), and workflow. VS has always been a great debugging environment, and now includes even better support for Javascript debugging as well. The Professional edition includes debugging support for remote systems - you can attach to an IIS worker process on another machine, step through code, look at data, catch exceptions as they happen - and also integrated support for unit testing.

VS 2008 als includes LINQ (Language INtegrated Query), a SQL-like language to manipulate and query object collections, as well as external, non-object data such as XML and SQL Server databases. Imagine a query language with compile-time type-checking and strong syntax and name validation, from your code all the way down to the database tables. That's LINQ! My team is completing a commercial web project built entirely on LINQ to SQL, and I've found LINQ to be an incredibly flexible and powerful new tool.

Service Pack 1 for VS 2008 includes a number of new features for data, including the Entity Framework (language-level entity-relationship modeling for your database, with LINQ support and a much-improved visual design environment), Dynamic Data (builds a complete web-based front-end for your database in minutes, with full update support), and data services, using LINQ and Entity Framework to access web services.

An additional add-in provides development support for Silverlight. You can also download add-ins for dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby, and functional languages such as F#. (All of these are free, and are likely to be in the next version of Visual Studio.

The MSDN subscription adds on developer and testing licenses for all the operating systems (including Windows Server 2008) as well as SQL Server (Enterprise Edition with a developer license). This is a huge benefit for developers; I run a Windows Server system here at home, so I can stage and test in a server environment that's completely independent of production systems. That's been a huge advantage in spotting problems before deploying your work.

The premium subscription includes development and test licenses for SharePoint, BizTalk, Exchange, and many other server platforms, along with a full license for the complete MS Office line and much of the MS Expression tool set for WPF and Silverlight.

Visual Studio, and the subscription, are not cheap, but they are a tremendous value. I think this is simply the best development environment available today.

If you are going to be programming for Windows in .NET, you basically need to have this. The fact that it changes dramatically every few years, and not always for the better, is very annoying - but it makes MS a lot of money.

We have our development team all using VS 2005, and if one of us upgrades to this setup, then we pretty much all do as we cannot rely on the code being checked in to not have some odd little VS 2008 specific thing in it.

Which means we all have to get used to the slight differences and the company has to then incur the upgrade cost.

MSDN and specifically the downloads you can get with it is critical if you are doing any serious business programming for the MS platform(s).

So while I would rather program in just about any other language available (hate), getting paid to write MS specific code means you need to use this (love, getting paid).