I am the sole .net developer for a small company. My projects span many .net technologies including WinForms, WPF, SQL, XNA, Linq, WCF, WTF?, and others.
I struggle staying on top of all these projects so I’m looking to make my life easier with the release of VS2010. Without a mentor I rely heavily on StackOverflow and whatever else Google comes up with. Should I convince my company to get an edition with an MSDN subscription? Is it one of those things where once you have it, you can’t imagine life without it?
What about the source control that comes with VS2010, do you all find it better than an SVN server?
We’re looking to hire another programmer this year, would I be best off getting a Team edition of VS2010 to be best prepared for that hire?
Thanks!
If you want “Intellitrace” (aka “historical debugging”) you’ll need Ultimate.
Similarly Premium and Professional incrementally have fewer features. Any other these, or some combination could be the deciding factor. There is a comparison on the product pages.
Also, consider the value of an MSDN Subscription, getting you access to OSs, servers and tools for development and test (and one instance of Office for general use).
Even as a sole developer you should still be using source control (unless it is VSS :-)), whether SVN, GIT, TFS, … all the paid editions will give you integration. ALM (application lifecycle management) like TFS will do source code control (SCM or VCS) as well as work item tracking (defects, feastrues) and much more. VS paid editions + MSDN include TFS (and you can run it on a Workstation — server OS only no longer).
In my opinion if you are being employed professionally as a developer in the MS platform, VS Pro + MSDN is a minimum (otherwise ask yourself about the standard of employment), and really it should be VS Ultimate + MSDN. Compare the cost of employing you with the cost of the subscription (especially once on a VL program — and you only need a single MSDN subscription to qualify for VL).