Customer Reviews

Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2005 Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

(Based on Microsoft Subscription Final Release Product. Tested December 2005)
Lots of nifty features, but unfortunately it needs a few more months of development before it will really be stable. They say a serious update will be coming out sometime in mid 2006. Hopefully the problems with hangups, corrupted project files, and the maddeningly slow text input will be fixed then, so we can start to do some serious programming with this potentially very exciting product.

Focusing on all the good points only, this is a great upgrade from VS 2003. HOWEVER, two major cons: there are many bugs and the environment is SLOW. I have confirmed that these problems are common by searching various forums and blogs. It is quite easy to crash this program and I spend too much time waiting while navigating through the software.

These two factors certainly inhibit productivity. I am just praying the service pack due out this summer (yes, we have to wait that long) deals with these issues. I have invested a lot of time learning the .net framework and if MS doesn't get its act together on the next service pack or (g0d help us by the next version of Visual Studio) I will sorely regret not learning an alternative productivity package. I have my fingers crossed.

I have been working on the Beta 2 version of the application and seriously considering buying the release version until I read the review above. It appears a lot of the performance and corrupt project file issues have not been fully corrected in the release version. I have had, on occassion, to get into the source code (using a text editor) to make some corrections to get the project back and working. I imagine, though, the release version is an improvement on the beta 2 version of which I am familiar.

That said, this is a great product for those familiar with earlier versions of Visual studio. The Integration of the database part of things so you can perform decent database operations without having reinvent the wheel everytime is quite welcome. Database gurus can write all the stored procedures, put together database diagrams, design tables and queries to their hearts content using roughly the same environment as the rest of the application.

Web developers will be thrilled with the tools available.

The intellisense technology is quite improved, flagging things like variables that have not been fully initialized like being initialized in some blocks but not in other areas - leaving the code open to null references.

My installation involved a SQL server version upgrade. I hope the release version has a smoother path to that upgrade. If not, what I would advice is follow the directions carefully, and where that does not work, scour the internet for clues and a allot a lot of time.

The summary is that, without the bugs, this is an excellent product. It is up to you to decide whether to upgrade now or wait for the service release. Either way, when you get to try it, I imagine you'd be pleased with the outcome.

I've been using the product for several months now for both web and winforms development, professional and personal. I run it on a three year old Dell laptop, with an Athlon 4 processor. It has occasionally been slow, especially when I was working on a half million line winforms application I'd ported from VB6. That said, I had far fewer speed problems than some collegues, my laptop having 1 Gb RAM, and them only 500Mb.
I find this version of Visual Studio lacks many of the bugs and glitches of 2003, and I really like the enhancements to ASP.NET development such as Master Pages, Generics, and the ability to use Atlas/AJAX components as web controls.
All in all this is a fantastic step forward for the developer, just make sure you have as much RAM as possible. A Service Pack in the near future would probably be helpful too.

In Visual Studio Express (free from Microsoft), you can try out the development environment and work with C#, Visual J+, Visual Basic, and C++. That is a great introduction and is all many people will need. Professional IT people developers, and serious students working in development will benefit from the industry-standard full edition.

Moving to the full Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition is well worth the money for the improvements in functionality. Here you get SQL Server Developer Edition (all the funtionality of Enterprise Edition, but license limited to development purposes). This includes Integration Services (import and transform data), Analysis Services (multidimensional processing), and Reporting Services (advanced intractive reports), all three omitted from Express Editions, as well as the full SQL 2005 database engine. It is fair to note that SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition can be purchased as stand-alone software for under $50, an incredible bargain, but that obviously is not the full Visual Studio package for developing applications.

In addition, the full Visual Studio supports Visual Studio Tools for Office (VISTO - now a free download), for programming solutions for Microsoft Office applications, and supports adding third party plug-in software, while the Express Edition does not. Just remember to budget for books and training, and to make time to use the online education from Microsoft. The VS interface does not put everything in the menus. You need to know when and where to right-click, and how the myriad components relate to each other. And plan for the next upgrade too, probably coming in 2008 per the Microsoft web site.

Visual Studio Professional 2005 appears to be the first finished product Microsoft has released since DOS 3.1. So far it has performed as advertised. For those of you who held out with VB6 as I did for so long, it's time to move up. The learning curve is steep; but, it's worth the climb.

Charles Weeden McDaniel
Software Developer

By far more superior than Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual Studio 2000. Much more along the lines of a development tool built for developers not for marketing the product. I have coded in both C# and VB using this tool and found it to be the most far superior of any other development tool I have used.

Useful, adds important new features.
Highly recommended.

UPDATE 2006-02-24

This is the ONLY program running on a Compaq Presario 3000T 3.4GHz 5.4K RPM Notebook (See below for the REASON it is now the only program on this notebook) It is on this notebook because I sometimes want to experiment at night with very short programs; just a hundred lines or so...

1) The response is often so slow, it is unbelieveable. (Someone else commented on this). I type, and nothing happens, and a second or two later, finally, the characters appear. Just slow, slow, slow. Not just typing but saves, etc. SLOW.
2) I have already had one project wiped out by a VS bug. Visual Studio conveniently wrote the program output (Console.WriteLine()) into the project.cs file (ie it merged the two into one. Permanently)
3) I love how VS saves modifications to your project without asking you if you want it to. A neat feature. (The default)
4) The quality of the help is so variable I still can't even figure out what the examples are trying to exemplify. (Absolutely unreadable and incomprehensible)
5) Sometimes VS gets "confused" as to where files are in projects. Ie, it reads one file from one project and another from another project. (A directory bug, apparently). Real neat.

Hence the title and the rating.

I installed this on one computer with no problems. It is great to use for software development, etc. (After all, that is what we purchased it for)

However, I installed it on my notebook. By, by notebook. The program update feature just would NOT work. Typical uselessly OBSCURE Microsoft error message 'The operation could not be completed ...'. After many installation, removal, repair, registry cleaning cycles, etc. I gave up. A couple of thousand dollars of lost productivity. I am just now formatting my hard disk to completely reinstall Windows and everything else. Nothing like good Human Factors (Make sure the user has no clue as to what is wrong) Thank you, Bill.

Lesson? A future without Microsoft.

Fantastic product! I enjoy it very much. Well worth the money. Another winning product for Microsoft.