Visual Studio 2010 editions and “The Ultimate offer” – If you’re buying Visual Studio in the next three months, information you MUST know

Visual Studio business news - Visual Studio 2010 transition benefits: “the ultimate offer” – What you need to know

“Visual Studio 2010 is about to come in few months (March 22nd) and I have been receiving many, many, many questions around the new product family and the transition benefits.

I’ll answer some of them in this post and will probably update it later if I have additional recurring questions.

So before jumping on the product capabilities I want to spend 1 minute on Why Microsoft is changing the line-up.
As you already know, Visual Studio is the main developer tool to build software applications on the Microsoft platform. At the end of the day, we don’t really care about the IDE but more about the solution you are building, Visual Studio will come automatically if you have decided to use part of the Microsoft platform (from .NET to C++, Office to Sharepoint, embedded to Azure….).

People were a bit confused between the different editions of Visual Studio. As an example, does a developer need Visual Studio professional (the main IDE to write code) or a Team Developer? A developer may need some testing or modelling capabilities only available in the Team Test or Team Architect edition, so what is the recommended SKU ? As Visual Studio 2010 is extending the capabilities (test management, code visualisation ….) the right move was not to add more editions but to simplify the product family. We’ll have 3 levels of Visual Studio

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional – the basic one
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium – the standard one
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate – the advanced one

You can notice that no edition contains “Team System” in the description or a job role (like Developer, Tester …).
The idea is that any edition can suit your needs. It’s up to you to look at the capabilities, what you want to achieve and your team maturity to point out the right level.

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This "Auto upgrade" means you will get an edition with many more features than you have with your current Visual Studio edition for the duration of your subscription.
Different scenario to optimize this “Ultimate offer” - transition benefits

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If you’re planning on purchasing any editions of Visual Studio in the next few months this is information you MUST know. In short, I hate to say it but IMHO only a… um… cough… sucker… cough… would buy Team Suite VS2008 right now.

Review the above post and contact your MS rep to make sure your making a good licensing decision

 

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