James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
Visual Studio .NET Editions
Visual Studio .NET is available in four editions: Professional, Enterprise Developer, Enterprise Architect and Academic. The core languages can also be purchased seperately in standard editions. We've reviewed the Professional edition here, which includes all the core features. The Enterprise editions include additional software such as SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition, support for managing databases on SQL Server and Oracle and Visual SourceSafe. (For more information, you can compare the different editions here).
It is also worth noting that Visual Studio .NET can only be installed on Windows NT/2000/XP and if you're using Windows NT 4.0 or Windows XP Home Edition you won't be able to use ASP.NET or COM+. Hardware requirements shouldn't be a great problem for developers; on my outdated 500Mhz Pentium III and 384MB RAM, it only ran slightly sluggishly, but for those of you with smaller hard disks, do bear in mind you're going to need 2GB of space. Fortunately the applications you create won't be quite so demanding; although they won't be able to run on Windows 95 (as the .NET Framework doesn't support this platform).
Conclusion
Visual Studio .NET is the best IDE from Microsoft yet, with so many features that it has been impossible to cover them all here. I did experience an occasional problem with things such as the design view, and there are some inconsistencies with the features available for VB.net programmers vs. those available for C# programmers. Many of the benefits do simply come from the .NET Framework, however Visual Studio makes it simple to take advantage of all it's features in the easiest manner possible. The massive array of tools, windows, and great code editor (and the lack of any comparable application for Windows programming...) makes Visual Studio a must for any serious Microsoft developer.
Purchasing
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Visual Studio .NET Professional |
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Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect Amazon UK Price: £1,807.99 [purchase / more info] Amazon US Price: $2,389.99 [puchase / more info] |
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