A comparison of VS.NET 2003 vs. VS.NET 2005

[Uncle Ben]

At a recent MSDN conference, one of the presenters vehemently said that
VS.NET 2003 (because of its web project) is only good for _single_
developers. He said that if you're working in a team environment (i.e. more
than one developer), VS.NET 2005 is the way to go.

We are currently developing on classic ASP and want to move to ASP.NET soon.
But hearing that comment, our team of 5-10 developers might want to wait for
the release of VS.NET 2005 if there are collaboration problems with VS.NET
2003.

I'd like to hear from experienced VS.NET 2003 if team collaboration is
indeed difficult in that version.

Thank you very much!

 

[Guest]

Hey Ben

Our team has elected to move to Visual Studio 2005 now using the Beta 2,
which comes with a "Go Live" license meaning you can place it into production.

I've been using Whidbey now since the PDC of 2003 and it is very stable and
the productivity enhancements in this version are so compelling that we
elected to move early.

I don't know if you're planning on moving from classic ASP to ASP.NET with
VB or C# but I personally would recommend C# and would recommend that your
developers go through the mind meld to become proficient with object-oriented
constructs such as inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation ... this will
lead to better designs and implementations.

Visual Studio 2005 contains the following enhancements which for me we
really the primary compelling reasons to move:

1. Generics
2. Nullable Types
3. Anonymous Methods
4. Iterators
5. Refactoring in the IDE
6. Code snippets which can be altered to meet your own coding convensions.
7. Export / Import of IDE settings to XML.
8. Unit Testing built into the IDE
9. Code Coverage Analysis

etc. etc. etc.

Working with Visual Studio 2005, it is a wonder I ever got anything done
with the 2003 version

- Doug

 

[Uncle Ben]

Thank you for your answer, Doug. How much does the "Go Live" license cost?
I'm running a small shop.

Does VS.NET 2005 integrate well with VSS 6.0d? That's the one that we are
using currently with classic ASP.

I don't think VSTS (Team System) is suitable for us. So, it's important
that VS.NET 2005 continues to work well with VSS 6.0d.

We'll look into ASP.NET C# as well.

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

The "Go Live" license is free if you have access to the beta on MSDN
Subscriber Downloads. I believe you can purchase the DVD also directly but
you might not recieve it until early May.

Once the Visual Studio 2005 product goes RTM (release to manufacturing) you
would however be obliged to buy a copy of the level you decided to use.

One thing I forgot to mention is that Visual SourceSafe has some limitations
in its current form, and there is a new version of Visual SourceSafe 2005
which addresses some of these concerns, that said however the Team System
edition has its own enterprise level source control system which stores
source and documents within SQL Server 2005.

Regards,

Doug Holland

 

[Uncle Ben]

In the interim, could I upgrade our Visual SourceSafe 6.0d to Visual
SourceSafe 2005 for use with our existing ASP projects?

 

[Guest]

I would check with Microsoft if that is a supported use of SourceSafe 2005.

I would guess however that that wouldn't work...

Google for the SourceSafe team blog and ask the question there...

Sorry

Doug