Who is going to switch to VS 2008?

Ray Hayes

If you're planning on upgrading because you want to do something new, such as WPF, then VS2008 is obviously a nice new option - if it were my hard cash, I'd go for the free Express Edition.... If you have an MSDN subscription at work, double check the small print. IIRC you are allowed 5 separate installations, one of which can be at home [as long as it's only you using it]. With MSDN, you already have access to VS2008.

Regards, Ray

Jon Sagara

Bought it. Switched to it. Love it.

Jon Sagara On a traffic light yellow means yield, and green means go. On a banana, it's just the opposite, yellow means go ahead, green means stop, and red means, where'd you get that banana? -- Mitch Hedberg .NET Blog | Personal Blog | Articles

Chris Austin

S Smerk wrote:

o how many of you developers out there actually bought your own VS 2005 with your OWN money, not your company's money?

Does it count if I own the company?

S Smerk wrote:

Now, out of those who did, are you going to buy VS 2008 or wait a while like myself?

I'd say that only 15-20 % of the code we produce is .net. A very small percentage of that is the typical enterprisey or IT support products. And, I haven't seen anything in the unmanaged realm of this VS release that makes me want to run out and pick it up. Granted, I haven't been looking too hard, I plan on doing some revisions to our platform & market research in March after I clear my plate a bit. So, I may change my mind.

S Smerk wrote:

My company uses VS 2005 and will be using it for sometime...they have invested a lot of money into it already.

Yeah, the whole 2 year release cycle is starting to wear a bit thin on budgets for those who don't want or need MSDN or MS Partner subscriptions. It really is a conundrum for MS, on one hand they need to generate marketing buzz and revenue but, on the other hand they don't seem to bee addressing bugs and improvements to VS as they should IMHO.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long

originSH

Well I got VS2005 for free from helping an MS employee with a side project :) And I'll be going to the 2008 launch event so hopefully I'll be getting a free copy of that :)

Not Active

Already switched, actually switched about three months ago, though some of my clients still want projects done with VS2005, so I have to maintain both.

only two letters away from being an asset

Member 96

I bought vs2005 with my company's money which is my money and I'm waiting, there is no real need that I can see to upgrade. I used to keep an msdn universal subscription for many years until they frigged it all up a few years ago with all the team system crap and other changes at which point I took a hard look at what we really needed and decided it was far more cost effective to simply buy what we need when we need it off the shelf. It was a huge mistake for them to ditch the old universal subscription, I bet a *lot* of people at that point cancelled or downgraded their subscription and it probably cost MS a lot of developer revenue. If they wanted to lose revenue they should have kept the old system but dropped the price in half and made it easier for more developers to get on board.

When everyone is a hero no one is a hero.

ProfessorDan

Have MSDN so have been evaluating for last few months it seems to be worth an upgrade if you have the $$s. Still using 2005 for production due to major deployment this month of in-house software but hope to switch in March or April. Love the fact that I can target .Net 2.0 vs 3.5 it will take a while for us to test and deploy 3.5 with over 10,000 pc in the enterprise we move slowly at times Dan

Member 96

Marc Clifton wrote:

there's a business case in the performance improvements

News to me, no one has made any case for performance improvements that I've heard of.

When everyone is a hero no one is a hero.

Chris Losinger

kindof a trick question, i am the sole employee of my company. but the company bought vs05 and vs08. we (The Company) still use VC6 for most of our C++ work, though. just one product has moved to VS05. i doubt we'll move any of them to VS08 any time soon. no reason to.

image processing toolkits | batch image processing

mejax

You can download the VS 2008 Trial from the microsoft site.

Chris Austin

John C wrote:

I bet a *lot* of people at that point cancelled or downgraded their subscription and it probably cost MS a lot of developer revenue.

I meet monthly with local small business owners in the software field. About a dozen of us get together for dinner and drinks to share war stories and our outlook on the bidness. And, it seems what you said has been echoed by just about every one of them who develop exclusively for windows. I really think with the change in MSND, the move to the Team System silliness, the refusal to place bug fixes ahead of new releases, and 20 friggin versions of vista that MS has really confused and annoyed a lot of developers and end users.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long

Mike Dimmick

Matthew Faithfull wrote:

Of course if you insist on falling for the charms of C# then it's going to cost you

Not really, the C# compiler is included in the .NET Framework runtime distribution. Of course I wouldn't want to debug an application with the included mdbg or cordbg in the .NET Framework SDK, and don't really fancy developing Windows Forms apps by manually coding them. That is of course what the Forms designer does - generates code in the InitializeComponent method. But on a couple of occasions when I needed a fairly quick throwaway app, I've just written it in a text editor and run csc from the command line.

DoEvents: Generating unexpected recursion since 1991

Slacker007

I know that I can get it free but there are limitations to the free version. Limitations like that bug the sh**t out of me. i.e. the class designer.

mejax

Didn't get you,anyway the trial of Visual Studio Team System 2008 has a working class designer...

Xiangyang Liu

Marc Clifton wrote:

I would say there's a business case ...

Marc, I clicked your reply first (before reading the original post) expecting some good sarcasm from you, I was so disappointed. :-D

My .NET Business Application Framework My Home Page

Member 96

It was such a no brainer before with the old msdn universal, one price and you got everything, it was a form of insurance, you never knew what you were going to need and once you paid the initial subscription it was just the renewal fee yearly after that. No muss no fuss. Then, at a time when MS had pretty much shot their wad on any new releases of any of their products for some time they decide they don't want the smaller development shops any more and come out with the team system craziness and force everyone to make a decision. In effect Microsoft bit the hand that feeds them, there are a *lot* of smaller ISV's like us out there not to mention consultants and for hire programmers who were shat on with that decision. Also a lot of the really big shops had no use for the team system crap either, they already had their own testing and profiling and RCS systems in place. Couple that with the lack of any new releases of anything substantial and it was a no brainer to just say screw it, when I need it I'll buy it "off the shelf" and screw the whole msdn system entirely. It was the most brain dead move MS made in years. Maybe this recent shake up at MS management will result in someone sane being in charge of developer stuff.

When everyone is a hero no one is a hero.

Mark Salsbery

In the future (and I learned this from the fine people on this site), keep an eye out for release events sponsored/presented by Microsoft. They give away a LOT of copies every release - full versions. Mark

Mark Salsbery Microsoft MVP - Visual C++ :java:

Xiangyang Liu

Chris Losinger wrote:

i doubt we'll move any of them to VS08 any time soon. no reason to.

I was disappointed in VS05 and wanted to try VS08, but found out we (The Company) did not buy VS08. BTW, I am one of the 20000+ employees in The Company, only a small portion of us, about 2000, work on code.

My .NET Business Application Framework My Home Page

Dan Neely

Only if you use it proactively to synergise the paradigm shift to enterprise centric WTPF data processing.

Otherwise [Microsoft is] toast in the long term no matter how much money they've got. They would be already if the Linux community didn't have it's head so firmly up it's own command line buffer that it looks like taking 15 years to find the desktop. -- Matthew Faithfull

Whytespot

Bought 2005 with my own money, company bought 2008. I'll play around with it for a few months at work before I make a decision on purchasing it for personal use.