From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/273858/software-worth-buying, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/143088/open-source-c-projects-that-have-high-code-quality and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/180939/net-must-have-development-tools, I found some software tools are multiple recommended such as Reshaper, dotTrace, and NDepend.
I use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and it has some features such as code coverage, profiling, and StyleCop to name a few, and it's pretty expensive.
As a user of VS 2010 Ultimate, is it worth while to invest those tools I mentioned? Or, do they provide similar functionalities that VS 2010 Ultimate already has?
Prosseek, this is a good question you are asking. I have tested VS options and most of third-party options. From my experience, third-parties tooling are always more convenient whatever the area covered. I agree with Ladislav Mrnka opinions: VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation".
In more details:
R# is more subtle and relevant than VS equivalent, when it comes to read, edit and refactor code.
NCover is as fast as VS coverage, but it doesn't come with the frictionfull instrumentation phase. Also NCover proposes more interesting facilities to harness coverage results.
DotTrace is faster and easier to harness than VS profiler, both for performance and memory management. There are also interesting alternatives like RedGate ANTS performance and memory profilers.
TestDriven.NET is more adapted to run tests than VS test integration, especially because it integrates with most of third-party options (as a consequence if you are only using VS tooling, TD.NET is useless).
My opinion is certainly biased concerning NDepend since I am part of the tool team. An objective and measurable fact is that NDepend is 10 to 100 times faster concerning dependency graph and matrix and I encourage you to verify this fact by yourself (NDepend comes with a trial). Also, here you'll find an independent comparison of NDepend versus VS2010 Arch.
All these tools have trial so you can try it yourselves and you will see. VS Ultimate provides large feature set out of the box but many features are like "basic implementation". It is always about what you expect from these features and what you like. I love Resharper but I worked with people who didn't like it.
Related
What's missing in Visual Studio Community 2015? They say it's full-featured and free, but if that's the case, then why do/will they still sell Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 or Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 for 6 grand?
Something is missing in the Community preview, right? And why is it called 'Community'? My code won't be synced across your devices like the new Windows 10 update system is, will it? (Kind of joking about that last part, and kind of not, too).
There are 2 major differences.
Technical
Licensing
Technical, there are 3 major differences:
First and foremost, Community doesn't have TFS support.
You'll just have to use git (arguable whether this constitutes a disadvantage or whether this actually is a good thing).
Note: This is what MS wrote. Actually, you can check-in&out with TFS as normal, if you have a TFS server in the network. You just cannot use Visual Studio as TFS SERVER.
Second, VS Community is severely limited in its testing capability.
Only unit tests. No Performance tests, no load tests, no performance profiling.
Third, VS Community's ability to create Virtual Environments has been severely cut.
On the other hand, syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, Step-Through debugging, GoTo-Definition, Git-Integration and Build/Publish are really all the features I need, and I guess that applies to a lot of developers.
For all other things, there are tools that do the same job faster, better and cheaper.
If you, like me, anyway use git, do unit testing with NUnit, and use Java-Tools to do Load-Testing on Linux plus TeamCity for CI, VS Community is more than sufficient, technically speaking.
Licensing:
A) If you're an individual developer (no enterprise, no organization), no difference (AFAIK), you can use CommunityEdition like you'd use the paid edition (as long as you don't do subcontracting)
B) You can use CommunityEdition freely for OpenSource (OSI) projects
C) If you're an educational insitution, you can use CommunityEdition freely (for education/classroom use)
D) If you're an enterprise with 250 PCs or users or more than one million US dollars in revenue (including subsidiaries), you are NOT ALLOWED to use CommunityEdition.
E) If you're not an enterprise as defined above, and don't do OSI or education, but are an "enterprise"/organization, with 5 or less concurrent (VS) developers, you can use VS Community freely (but only if you're the owner of the software and sell it, not if you're a subcontractor creating software for a larger enterprise, software which in the end the enterprise will own), otherwise you need a paid edition.
The above does not consitute legal advise.
See also:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262916/understanding-visual-studio-community-edition-license
Check the following: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/
Visual studio community is free version for students and other academics, individual developers, open-source projects, and small non-enterprise teams (see "Usage" section at bottom of linked page). While VSUltimate is for companies. You also get more things with paid versions!
Visual Studio Community is same (almost) as professional edition. What differs is that VS community do not have TFS features, and the licensing is different. As stated by #Stefan.
The different versions on VS are compared here -
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/compare-visual-studio-2015-products-vs
All these answers are partially wrong.
Microsoft has clarified that Community is for ANY USE as long as your revenue is under $1 Million US dollars. That is literally the only difference between Pro and Community. Corporate or free or not, irrelevant.
Even the lack of TFS support is not true. I can verify it is present and works perfectly.
EDIT: Here is an MSDN post regarding the $1M limit: MSDN (hint: it's in the VS 2017 license)
EDIT: Even over the revenue limit, open source is still free.
I am looking in to using sharpDevelop to develop Windows (.NET) applications over using Visual Studio. I'm just wondering if there are any serious limitations to using SharpDevelop over VS? The price is certainly right and at first glance it seems like a pretty decent IDE. I'm just wondering if it is compatible with VS. I mean if I am collaborating with other developers that are using VS, can we seamlessly pass projects/solutions back and forth and work on them? Just wondering what people's opinions are.
Past year I start using SharpDevelop to develop a large application.
Based on my experience, I can say these are some advantages in using it:
It's faster than Visual Studio; if your project is pretty large, you have to spend less time waiting for the project to compile
It's free
One important disadvantage I've found is the lack of a good refactoring system, in Visual Studio I used Jetbrains Resharper for its great refactoring support.
Now I've returned to use Visual Studio, just for the facilities offered by Resharper.
SharpDevelop 4.0 Beta 4 (as the most current version) is pretty stable as for a Beta. Besides being free it has some pretty features which can be extended via AddIn (a sort of plugin system). A large number of project templates for the most popular languages supporting the .NET Framework. A possible limitation is the support for ASP.NET which still lags behind VS.
Surely you can bet that the top versions of Visual Studio may have some better tools, options, better integration and so on.
Please consider comparing SharpDevelop to the Express Editions of VS. Then it will be obvious that SD is a big win if you don't have to pay. Consider it also as a different product, not only a copy of VS (just not to say 'option X is called here Y, opposed to VS').
This feature by feature comparison list for SharpDevelop vs. VS Express might be helpful.
I'm working on a project that was started using Visual Studio 2010. Although according to a special engine we've created the number of code lines is not very high, the project builds very slowly. I tested sharpdevelop, and it was about an order of magnitude faster!! The only problem we faced was that we could not debug our server and client together, something that VS does like a charm (well, that charm requires some patience), and shows the stack trace of the server, on top of the client, which is very useful.
My suggestion: use sharpdevelop unless you absolutely need a feature it lacks.
SharpDevelop 4.0 Beta does not support the default Visual Studio installer projects. However, since these are going to be deprecated after VS2010 by Microsoft, this is probably not a main issue for you.
With the general public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 today, this latest version has created a lot of hype and interest.
Indeed, the opinion I've gauged is that VS 2010 has resolved a great deal of the minor flaws left over from previous versions, as well as added some particularly useful new code editor and project development tools (in particular the Premium/Ultimate versions).
My question here is: what are you favourite new features in VS 2010 that have really got you excited? Or similarly, what are the flaws of VS 2008 that you are most glad to have resolved?
There is a wealth of changes in VS 2010, of course, but these are some of the ones that have interested me most (about which I know!).
Integrated support for F# (with multi-targeting for .NET 2.0 - 4.0)/
Much improved WPF designer. The VS 2008 was more than a bit buggy at times.
Great improvements to the code editor, such as call hierarchy viewing.
A decent add-in framework.
A greatly expanded testing framework (now capable of database testing, for example) in Premium/Ultimate.
Project planning and modelling features in Premium/Ultimate.
If I could request one point/feature per post, I think that would be best, so we could vote them individually.
Visual Studio 2010's true Multi-Monitor Support sounds pretty fantastic.
The feature I'm most looking forward to having a decent play with is actually more .net 4 than visual studio. Parallel Extensions looks like it will be very interesting.
The new, clean web.config should make my managers happy.
"Just change the option in the web.config"
"Where is it?"
"Under 'AppSettings.'"
"Ugh ... there's so much junk in that file."
The built in profiler and historical debugger!
The 'Navigate To' window (Ctrl+,) is fantastic. Eclipse has something similar, and I've always thought Visual Studio needed it. Now if they would just add a 'Collapse All' button to the Solution Explorer...
One-click web publishing will be handy.
Favorite feature? Requiring 4 gigs of RAM to run it's bloat.
I liked many features
Deployment
Gated checkin
Parallel Programming
Faster debugging
Separate debugger for x86 and x64
These are just few.... The more you explore VS2010 the more you will get. Try to go through the videos by microsoft.
Thanks,
Sunil Agarwal
My dev environment now consists of:
vc# express / v web dev express
NUnit
Tortoise for Subversion
SqlYog for MySql
Custom automated copy/paste deployment
I'd like to use:
TestDriven.NET (looked at pex too and it seems interesting)
VisualSVN or AnkhSVN
Not sure if VS will have integrated control of mysql.
Deployment projects
Just to make things quicker and easier on myself... but is it worth it to pay out the $250 for a VS license (note: my employer is footing the bill, but try not to let that alter your judgement too much).
Visual Studio 2008 Standard has everything a traditional developer needs.
I use Professional at work and Standard at home (which I bought with the Expression Studio package - damn good deal). Unless you're wanting multi-process stuff, Std is perfectly adequate. I have mine using Silverlight Tools, and it "talks to" Blend and VisualSVN (MUCH better than AnkhSVN) perfectly well. It works with database servers (but doesn't debug MS-SQL), I imagine you'd have to get a MySQL provider for this element to work - which I guess you'd need anyway if you're working in MySQL on .NET.
Since your employer is paying for it, I assume this is for business purposes. Therefore, the question is whether you're more valuable to him with VS 2008 standard or $250?
Assuming you're spending a lot of time developing, the answer is almost certainly yes. If you make $50,000 a year, spend half your time developing, and the standard version improves your efficiency by 1%, that's a one-year break-even. (Actually better than that; if you make $50K a year you cost your employer more like $70K-$100K, depending on circumstances and accounting.)
It's almost always worthwhile to buy good tools for your workers, and software development tools are usually very inexpensive compared to software tools for other professions.
If you were developing at home, it would be a more difficult and subjective question, but since you're programming to generate revenue for somebody it's a question of dollars, and the dollars are overwhelmingly in favor of spending the money.
Bear in mind that you can buy 'upgrade' editions of VS and upgrade from the Express versions (or even Eclipse). So the list price you'd be looking at is USD199, with the real price more like USD160.
Given that it's a price vs features trade-off, this might be useful.
My personal advice would be not to mess about with toy freebie editions if you're trying to earn money for yourself or anyone else.
It depends on the application you'll create. The express edition won't let you combine different projects of different type in one solution. With a Visual Studio Professional you'll be able to debug an assembly from a C# class with another project within your web application.
If your project need only to be in one type of language than express is ok.
But I agree, if you will make money, a license is the way to go.
Yes. Without at least VS Standard, you can't use all the cool add-ins that make Visual Studio so powerful.
The express versions also do not allow you to create windows services - I changed to professional and now I can do that. You can still do it in express, however, you have to set up the project manually and know a little bit more about what you are doing.
I'd suggest that you wait until VS 2010 comes out, as there are so many new improvements, like context sensitive help... was completely revamped. Hold in there!
I would suggest going the route of purchasing the VS license and then going out and getting reshaper from jetbrains.com
Reshaper has built in unit test, refactoring, code completion, templates, ...
along with that you could use AnkhSVN as it is free, personally I have not found Visual SVN is worth the cost at even $50.
I'd like to increase developers' "comfort level" in our team a bit.
We are using Visual Studio 2008 and TortoiseCVS + WinCVS, but no integration as of yet.
In your CVS/Visual Studio experience, what is the best integration tool in terms of "supports basic CVS functionality add/diff/update/commit/annotate/etc", "works out of the box", almost "bug-free"?
a) commercial
b) free or open source
Edit:
There are 2 commercial MSSCCI bridge solutions I've found so far: PushOk.com and TamTam (daveswebsite.com). Both were developed quite a long time ago and now have only minor updates. Being MSSCCI bridges, they are somewhat limited in functionality and can not provide all the nice features of vsPackage SCC provider, but are probably better than nothing.
You might be stuck with one of those MSSCCI bridges you mentioned. As it is, not too many people still use CVS, especially those using Visual Studio (most of them seem to use Team System's revision control, or Subversion).
There's always the possibility of hacking together your own macros to take care of CVS operations, but this has the disadvantage of not giving you real, in-depth integration the way a an SCC provider, or even an old brige, would.
I don't know about CVS, but if going to SVN is an option, there's always Ankh.
Ankh is a open source choice
http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/