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).
Visual Studio is a great product and I use it daily. Our level of MSDN subscription is Premium. This opens most of the doors in the MSDN library and I can't say I'm missing Ultimate. When Visual Studio was still RC and Beta we were developing in it (Ultimate) and things like IntelliTrace were nice to have features but were definitely not make or break.
I would advise against getting Visual Studio Premium because it is lacking in some of the features that I use extensively such as Code Coverage and static code analysis.
I'd have to say I can't imagine life without an MSDN subscription. It would be impossible to develop (and test) on the range of platforms necessary.
As for the source repositories we have been using TFS 2010 for the last few months and found that the seamless integration with Visual Studio is the huge selling point. The ability to check-in and out is only one aspect of the system. The ability to create build definitions, view build history and manage work items, all through the IDE, saves so much time.
If price becomes a problem there are always alternatives to Microsoft. If you want to use SVN there are SVN plugins such as VisualSVN and ankhsvn. You could then use something like CruiseControl.Net for builds.
Working as a single developer or in a small team I've usually found that any version of VS (except for Express) is ok, the Ultimate version do have some interesting things, but not anything essential for many developers.
I'd suggest that you (or your boss) look at the Microsoft Action Pack. They've got a new one for developers where you'll get 3 VS Pro licenses plus a bunch of OS and Server licenses (some of them only for development but some of them are valid for any employee I think).
In England it seems to be about £290 per year with the 15% discount that's on right now, so very cheap for what you get. There are some requirements, but if you develop software using MS Software you probably have a fairly high chance of qualifying:
https://partner.microsoft.com/40132997
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.
Ok, I know this isnt a programming question, but I think its really important to understand the differences to be a more productive developer...so please don't close this question!! And yes, I do feel stupid for asking this question! Have only ever worked with the Prof edition of VS 2005/2008.
Now that we have a team of 6 people, I would like to what benefits Team System would offer us over 6 licenses of VS Professional? Also, what advantages does Team Foundation Server offer?
TFS can be good if you use work items and are interested in associating source changes with these work items. Otherwise, using it for a couple of weeks at a customer (that was not using work items) just made me want to run back to subversion.
Merging UI is not very good (to be polite), the VS plug-in always wants to contact the TFS server to check for any changes of the files you're using, there are false warnings of conflicts...
Note that I am the guy that usually defends Microsoft against the Java/PHP guys, so it is very strange for me to write this...
TFS is a great source control tool for every organization. And is much advance than Visual Source Safe. It also has work item management (for tasks) simmilar to Rational software. We are using it for years and not just for .Net languages.
With the Team System version you already have a Team Explorer wherein your users can access the source control. Also Team System consists of different sub products that targets specific job functions such as Team System for Development Edition (For developers), Team System Database Edition (For database architect), Team System Architect Edition (For System Architect), and Team System Test Edition (For testers). All those subversions are included on the Team Suite edition.
For the Professional version it could also benefit to the TFS source control system if the machine is installed with Team Explorer.
The major difference between Professional & Team System is Team Foundation Server. Team Foundation Server is the massive overhaul/replacement of Visual SourceSafe. But TFS also gives you other functionality such as work item tracking and other features to manage the complete development life cycle.
Hey, thanks to all for the answers so far! I have never worked in a team/collaborative environment before, so this is a tad bit new to me. We are in the midst of acquiring a "Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium subscription". I know that this package gets updated to "Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN" on March 22 2010.
Will I still be able to leverage collaborative efforts using this package? Is it worth the $2970 additional cost?
EDIT: We are applying for the Empower for ISVs subscription. We work mainly on SaaS/RIA solutions. Am I understanding the term "Work Item" correctly - that is if I wish to task Developer 1 with say XHTML/CSS, Developer 2 with a certain functional module, and Developer 3 with another functional module - each of these is considered a work item that can be easily tracked with VSTS?
Team system, even without team foundation server has code analysis capabilities and metrics for your code that actually quantifies how maintainable it is. For a project manager this is nirvana when trying to find out who does a great job on their code and for a developer it gives him hard facts about where to improve his code.
That being said I think Team Foundation Server might be overkill for a team of 6 people except if you are building an extremely large system.
If you are comfortable with Subversion or a different version control manager,
you are dont mind using Nunit (or alternative unit test tool) and you are
familiar with or can find the open source (or fee based) code metric tools,
and you have bug tracker in place you can save quite a bit of money on the licensing.
I have worked a lot with Team System, and at some clients, just the Pro Version.
While some of the integration TS offers is slick, I am so used to nUnit and
Subversion that I actually miss them at times when working in TS.
Now in 2010, the Ultimate edition does offer some great UML diagramming and code analysis
tools that I will miss in lower versions.
Friend of mine just established own coding company. They wanted create professional application written in .NET.
Now he on the stage buying software. We have discussed what VS version is absolutely minimum for this purposes.
There are lot of different version Professional / Team Suite / Team Developer ...
I wonder what you recommend?
Ideally: less (possible) cost but not short-sightedness? Would be possible base on only VS Professional Edition?
I forgot to add that friend's company is partially refunded by EU. So it would be better to him spend more money at start then pay for upgrade in future. So, looking rather for target solution.
We have looked at comparison matrix obviously. We couldn't find strong arguments for "Team" edition. Believe most of "Team" features can be supplemented by 3rd parity tools (nUnit, Subversion, Resharper) what he used to use anyway...
If VS Professional would be selected - GDR will be the one think we noticed really missing in that approach.
Definitely check out Microsoft BizSpark. For next to nothing Microsoft will provide a software startup with Visual Studio, SQL Server, and other dev tools. I would also say that the edition doesn't matter as much as what comes with it. Look at the feature matrices of the various VS packages and figure out what you need. You can always upgrade later. I've done a lot of contract work with VS Express and there are no licensing restrictions on what you do with the software you build. Start small, and buy as necessary.
I suggest a look at the Visual Studio Editions comparison sheet and just check what you need. Note that from a technical perspective, you are not locked if you choose to start with a smaller edition.
At least Pro - given the description above you want to look at the BizSpark programme. If you don't/can't go down that route then you should be looking at an MSDN sub to at least the VS Pro level.
I would start with the Express Editions and upgrade to another edition if you miss functionallity (e.g. Add-Ins like Resharper; they cannot be used in the express edition). Upgrading is no problem since you can use your projects in all editions.
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.
Why isn't there a Team Foundation Server Express Edition?
Almost 3 years and 16 answers later,TFS Express is now a fact.
The Express Editions are specifically designed for individuals who do not have access or, more bluntly, cannot afford the full versions of Visual Studio but who would like to develop in the .NET Framework.
Team Foundation Server on the other hand, is specifically designed for corporations which has software development teams with a number of members. Corporations (nor startups) have never been the target of the Express product.
You can still take advantage of Express editions and collaborative tools by using open source products in conjunction with them, e.g., use Subversion for source control, Cruise Control for continuous integration, etc. They will give you most of what you need and still allow you to use the Express editions in a team environment.
I am not sure, however, if specifically using Express editions in a team environment is a violation of its EULA. Hope not :P
There is an Express version of TFS coming out with Visual Studio 2012:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/02/23/coming-soon-tfs-express.aspx
Because Microsoft is positioning TFS to compete with software like ClearCase, releasing a free edition would undermine that positioning.
If you're looking for the source-control a bug-tracking functionality that TFS provides, there are a number of free products out there that can do it for you like CVS or Subversion if you want something open source. TFS is meant to be used by very large teams, addressing the kinds of problems you have with very large teams - using it for just source control is total overkill.
I prefer Sourcegear's products (they're free for single developers) - Vault if you're just looking for source control, and Vault Professional (previously called "Fortress") if you want source control along with bug and work item tracking, which covers most of TFS's functionality.
Well, it's an interesting question, but the real question is what the usage scenario for such a thing would be?
In particular, I see TFS as focusing heavily on supporting dev teams. (Whether it does a good job of that or not, it's a different matter). Certainly individual developers could benefit from things like the source control facilities in TFS, but it's not clear how a single individual would take advantage of a lot of the functionality in TFS.
And, for pure source control, there are already good alternatives for that already on the market (the way I see it)
Also, it's interesting to note that TFS has some substantial hardware, software and environment requirements that I'm not sure would make it easy for a single individual to host; unless he can spare one machine just to run it (some people do it; I find it a waste of a good machine, myself :)).
And for small teams, there's already TFS WorkGroup Edition, which I guess is as close as MS is going to get to TFS express.
And individuals shouldn't be using TFS?? That's like saying source control is only for groups and not individuals.
If they had an express edition of TFS, then they'd probably get more people using it and paying for their company to use it.
I guess you could say that there is an Express version! Codeplex! Just like the express editions of Visual Studio have certain limitations, you can use Codeplex for free, but you must develop open source.
Doesn't the TFS workgroup edition somewhat fill this 'express' role? 5 users or less and the price is very 'express' when compared to the full 800 pound gorilla.
IBM have a similar product to TFS, Rational Team Concert, and its available for free for a small number of users.
At last Express edition of Team Foundation Server is also available. Check it out here.
No, from memory anything Team Foundation based costs a few times more than the professional versions. That's where Microsoft really makes its money.
The most straightforward answer is that TFS doesn't scale DOWN well enough for it to be worthwhile. TFS is very much aimed at development teams of medium, large, and huge sizes, it's not designed well for very small teams.
Also, on the small scale there are already pretty high quality free, or inexpensive, source control systems available, so it doesn't make much sense for MS to put effort into competing in that area.
I would suggest using SVN with the VisualSVN plug-in if you require source control, which everyone does, on the cheap.
Look at it this way, Visual Studio 2008 Standard is a $250 product. How much of that functionality exists in, say, Visual C# 2008 Express? At least the equivalent of $25 worth? Most likely. At least $10 easily. VSTS 2008 Team Foundation Server is a $2500 product. If they did the same amount of feature reduction to make a TFS Express edition it would be worth $250, which is a bit much to give away for free. More so, a lot of the value of TFS is in its scalability and core feature-set, which is almost impossible to strip away to create a simplified, cheaper product.
I think the reason that Microsoft doesn't have a SQL Server Express version of TFS is because TFS includes SSAS under the covers. I doubt there will ever be an "express" version of SSAS.
Here is the link to download the TFS Express Edition Beta: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/downloads#tfs-express