Visual Studio 2008: Is it worth the upgrade from 2005?

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

If you have a release within a month, I'd suggest not upgrading. Make the upgrade to 2k8 part of the next major release ... no reason you should risk something not working quite the same or some other complication if everything is working as is.

Answer 2

It's worth it. It's faster, the designer is vastly improved (split view, faster context switching), it has better support for javascript and when you're ready to target 3.5, you'll be ready to go.

Answer 3

These are Microsoft's 10 reasons to upgrade (.DOC):

1. LINQ support
2. Same designer elements as Microsoft Expression (Web and Blend)
3. AJAX and WCF/REST
4. Better WPF support
5. Improved MSTEST (also included in Professional edition)
6. Improved HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editors
7. Choose from Project settings which version of the framework to target
8. Improved Office dev tools, including ribbon UI and Click-Once support
9. Integrated WCF and WWF support
10. Better performance and stability

Answer 4

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 5

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 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.

Answer 7

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 8

I agree with Mr. Martinez in that I wouldn't port any existing projects up to the 3.5 framework, but the split designer and javascript debugging is worthwhile on its own.

Answer 9

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 10

I'd upgrade, but set aside some time for the install process. It took two hours on my moderately fast dev workstation, and I'm still doing updates, patches, hotfixes, two hours after the install finished... (haven't gotten any "real work" done today at all!)

Answer 11

It is helpful in the particular case you describe. Consider the following:

1) You are at the start of a development cycle. It is always easier to make these types of changes at the start of or between cycles as opposed to in the middle of one. Given this principle, your next convenient time to upgrade (if the schedule is not delayed) would be next Spring.

2) VS2008 allows for the compiler to target any specific .NET runtime version including 2.0 if you need to continue supporting an older framework.

Also, as some of the other answers have suggested, go straight to SP1. The service pack upgrade experience was not nearly as big of an ordeal as VS2005 SP1... at least in my experience.

Answer 12

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.