Thank you for your reply. I've found that your answer may only apply to VS Professional though. Concerning VS Premium, it appears that Steve Maier, in his answer below, was correct after all - what he said was confirmed by MS licensing customer support. I did find however that there are actually versions of both VS Premium and VS Ultimate without MSDN subscription, for some resaon they're not advertised openly on the MS homepage - I only found out by looking at a MS whitepaper about upgrade licenses. I even found a shop offering these versions, they are advertised as: 'MS Visual Studio 2010 Premium Single MSDN Software Assurance (SA) - Open License ' These licenses appear to be full licenses, but come at half the price of the standard version with MSDN. They even include the SA part of MSDN (i. e. upgrade rights), just lack the 12 month support via MSDN. P.S.: I've got to correct myself again: The product mentioned above appears to only include the software assurance for a limited time (one year?) for one user, but not the software itself. This is rather confusing - why purchase a license separate from a priduct?? :confused: I also finally found out the upgrade mechanism for VS Professional: There are actually two different mechanisms in place which is why it was so hard to get consistent info on it. 1. There's a promo which is about to run out these days, or even may have run out already - couldn't find a definite date for that. This promo is explicitely limited to owners of Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 only. 2. There's also a 'normal' upgrade package that requires 'any' previous IDE, including the free Express version or a third party product. This pack is somewhat cheapr than the full version, but still considerably more expensive than the promo version. Both upgrade packs include a 1 year subscription of 'MSDN Essentials', but do not require an active subscription. Once the subscription runs out, the product may still continued to be used, but not the software that MSDNe grants you licenses for (Windows 7 Ultimate, SQL Server, and a few others) - unless you upgrade to a full subscription of course.
modified on Friday, September 17, 2010 12:12 PM