Visual Studio 2008: Is it worth the upgrade from 2

Question

As of the fall of 2008 I'm about to embark on a new development cycle for a major product that has a winforms and an asp.net interface. We use Telerik, DevExpress and Infragistics components in it and all are going to have a release within a month or so which will be the one I target for our spring release of our product.

They all support VS2005 and we will continue to target .net 2+ so I can't see any compelling reason so far to upgrade to VS2008.

Has anyone found a compelling reason for upgrading to VS2008?

Answer 1

Yes, it's definately worth the upgrade. I would actaully say go straight to VS2008 SP1 as well. There have been a lot of IDE improvements (usability features and speed) and improvements in the web development experience as well including better JS and CSS support.

Answer 2

VS 2008 is not the point. The latest .Net package is the point. You can use Linq and all the other new Features with notepad and the commandline compiler but i guess that is more theoretical. So my statement is yes, .net 3.5 is the recommendation but using it without VS 2008 isn't a good idea.

Answer 3

Upgrade, you will not regret it in the slightest. In particular, Linq is going to make your life so much easier. There there are the extensions for c#.

That's barely touching the surface, there is certainly new toys in the area you are developing as well, either web, desktop or server.

Answer 4

To add to John's post, there is also built in unit testing, built in refactoring, code analysis, and the web designer for html\javascript is vastly improved. I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't upgrade.

Answer 5

The new C# language features are compelling for me:

automatic properties, object initializers, collection initializers, extension methods, lambda expressions.

For a quick overview from the guy responsible, see: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/03/08/new-c-orcas-language-features-automatic-properties-object-initializers-and-collection-initializers.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/03/13/new-orcas-language-feature-extension-methods.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/08/new-orcas-language-feature-lambda-expressions.aspx

Answer 6

It is worth the upgrade for me for the main reason that I can target different .NET versions (2, 3, 3.5) from the same IDE whereas in the past, one version of Visual Studio supported one version of .NET.

The UI seems much more responsive now, but the core set of tools and processes hasn't changed that much.