Marketplace reviews
Visual Studio .NET Professional
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.
Conclusion
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 Hardware requirements shouldn't be a great problem for developers; on my outdated 500Mhz Pentium III and 384MB RAM, it only ran slightly sluggishly, but for those of you with smaller hard disks, do bear in mind you're going to need 2GB of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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Events coming up
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Nov
18
15 Minutes of Fame
Dresher, United States
This is a yearly tradition. We select 10 of the favorite speakers from monthly meetings, code camps, and hands on labs. Each one does a 15 minute talk on their favorite .NET technology. This is our 10th anniversary so we plan a gala event with special prizes and refreshments.
I use VS 2005 Team Edition in a big projekt. I find this IDE a step backward. Refactoring functions are painful (i.e. why, when I want to rename local variable in a function, it tries to rename all ocurrences in whole solution?) To add functions known from Eclipse (i.e. error highliting while coding - this is most useful to me, advanced finding usages, i.e. going direct to inheritors, super-fast finding of classes with a list of possible options while typing), you have to install separete Plugin. This is such a pity, while this consumes much memory. With big project, such as our, overall tool performance is bad. In my team are colleagues, which in other projects worked with Java and Eclipse. Their opinion is, that Eclipse is much better. Not to insult anybody. We use it for developing client-server application, where client is desktop (winforms) application. I've heard, that VS is very helpful when working with ASP. My company has no big experience with this technology, we used mainly Java so far.
However, at that page says
"Visual Studio .NET does not support Edit and Continue for Visual Basic or Visual C# code."
You can debug while your editing..
You have to change your options,
here's how to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxurfeditcontinuedebuggingoptionsdialogbox.asp
PS It's called Edit and Continue
I'm relatively new to .NET, I have programmed in VB 6 on and off for a few years and I find the main annoyance for me is the inability to enter code while debugging, you can't even comment out lines. I'm not even sure if you can skip over lines of code while debugging. I'm finding it very frustrating. Does anybody know of any work arounds. Another gripe is do people notice how difficult it is to find even the most basic information on Microsoft and other products online these days.
I began programming a year ago with Visual Basic 6, after becoming very much used to the VB6 interface, using VB.NET is a huge shock to the rituals. Visual Basic is like a totally new language. For example, something as simple as changing a Form's Back ground colour is now: Form1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red which is a lot more complex than what it is.
VB.NET is as good as a new language, but will give new programmers a boost in learning other languages, such as the hyped C#.
Personally, I still prefer VB6, but along with all the changes, VB.NET is a lot more powerfull. I've got both VS6 and VS.NET installed, so I can get the best of both worlds, although I think I will be a complete .NET programmer within the next few months.
This thread is for discussions of Visual Studio .NET Professional.