Customer Reviews

Visual Studio 2010 Professional Upgrade

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I installed the product on a Win 7 64 bit system and it works great. Anyone with prior Visual Studio experience will no doubt be very happy with it.

VS is a great developmnet tool. This package also includes a basic msdn subscription.
I use it together with xamarin - mono for android to write android applications in C#. An excellent combination.

Visual Studio just keeps getting better with 2010 - even seems to load faster than my old 2005 model. Much cleaner navigation and work area. Installed very easily on Windows XP - no problems at all.

I look forward to developing with the new ribbon look in VC++, and also utilizing the other refinements to VSTO. So far the compatibility with the 64K development is above satisfactory; I have had no problems converting x86 to 64K applications. The only deficiency I have experienced is the price with the lack of a standard version (I missed the limited edition upgrade from 2008 standard).

For C++ programmers, Visual Studio 2005 was the best development tool.

Microsoft is always shrinking C++ feature set. VS 2005 had datasets, and
.NET Web Service Integration. VS 2008 scrapped those features.

VS 2010 is the first Visual Studio to not include Intellicense in .NET (only
native).

I use a P5 Duo Processor 2.2GHz with 4GB RAM and an upgraded video card, which was fine for VS2008. With VS2010, I spend a large portion of my time looking at the blue donut trying to remember why I bought it in the first place. I trippled my virual memory, discontinued as many processes and services as was reasonable, and monitor my Vista performance gauges to see where the bottleneck is. The CPU bounces between 6% and 100%, staying at 100% way too long, much too often. Apparently, it's the x86 environment that is giving me the blue donut because the RAM never goes over 50% usage and spends most time not visibly used at all. However, the hard disk use has skyrocketed as VISTA pages to it to cashe the overloaded CPU. (explaining the blue donut)

Personally, I don't want to buy a new computer to use software when I've yet to understand why a new machine is justified (aka: how someone like me, who isn't a tech writer, can increase their income), SP1 is already out on this software and reviews are extremely mixed about SP1, so I'm scared to download it. I've used MS products too long to leap into them with glee. With MS, I use YGF testing ("you go first").

WPF and Silverlight are great--except Adobe dominates that market space and Microsoft's entry I suspect will be the similar to that of FrontPage competing with Adobe's Dreamweaver, or in the Browser wars, where Internet Explorer keeps catching up to FireFox with each "new" release.

If you're in a high-dollar environment that's going to toss a ton of cash your way for hardware, training, and also has the cash to invest in a user base long serviced quite successfully by Adobe. A user base that MS is hoping will jump to a new offering of "Me Too" products, you'll probably scoot happily right along . If you operate on a budget, as I do, I'd download the trial copy and give it a full 30 days of free use. I didn't do that this time, and I regret it.

Two stars are for the bugs that created an early (scary) SP1 release, my new sidekick--the blue donut, the apparent need to invest another thousand dollars on a sleek 64-bit machine, and the new tomes that I have to purchase and read. I'm become weiry of doing that when experience has shown, more times than not, there no great epiphany at the end of the MS upgrade tunnel.

Visual Studio is hands down the best integrated development environment for developing apps for windows and other platforms. That's why I rate this product 5 stars.

The only negatives I've had is a lack of major improvements (could be good or bad), and I like the older 2008/2005 user interface. I also wish there was as much support for native C++ code as well as managed.