Why move to Visual Studio 2008?

I always wondered why/what would be a benefit in moving to VS 2008 or vs 2010 from VS 2005 , What would be in it for a company that has invested a lot in having code in VS 2005 to move to 2008 or 2010. I know the benefits of the framework and new features, but how do I sell one an idea to m开发者_运维知识库ove to the Latest framework?.

At this point, I would wait for VS 2010.

The biggest "new" feature in terms of selling this may be CLR 4. You won't be able to target or use CLR 4 components without moving to VS 2010, when it's released.

This wasn't an issue with 2008 - there, you just had the new C# and VB.NET features (which are very useful still). Now that there is a new CLR, however, you will need to be in the latest if you want to take advantage of componentry and third party libraries that are based on the new tools.

In addition, there are many useful new features in .NET 4 - such as the task parallel library - which are incredibly useful for developer productivity.

First of all, moving to VS2008 does not really cost you much, if anything vs. VS2005. You still can still target the same framework and use the same code constructs you were using before. There may be some rare instances where you have to fix something due to subtle changes introduced, but I haven't found any yet. Second, you are missing out on a lot of features that can significantly improve your productivity -- extension methods and LINQ just to name two, plus automatic properties (in C#3.0). VS2010 promises to have more improvements that can make you more productive. Third, while you may not want to switch immediately -- there can be good reasons to wait until the first service pack -- you do need to keep up or both your code and your skills will get stale. Eventually, your tools will no longer be supported or won't run on newer hardware -- then you'll be forced to change. In my mind it's better to have a plan to stay reasonably, if not absolutely, current in your tool set up if at all possible then to delay, missing all the benefits, and eventually be forced to play catch up.

VS2008 was more of a business release than anything, IMO. .NET framework 3.5 was still using most of the internal working of .NET 2.0.

VS2010 is .NET 4.0, new CLR and a lot of new features you can take a look at this list. (I am excited about this release)

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/08/25/vs-2010-and-net-4-series.aspx

If you are on VS2005, I would wait to VS2010 comes out.

The main reason to go VS2010 is to be able to use .NET 4.0 because it provides parallel solutions with new CLR. Without VS2010 you can't use parallel classes that makes parallel programming very easy like AsParallel interface.

Note that, in addition to some really great features, VS2010 can still target .NET 2.0 applications. Switching to VS2010 does not mean abandoning your existing code, even if you were afraid that using .NET 4.0 or 3.5 would break your code (fairly unlikely).

I would wait for VS10. I think you should not think only of new features: development is always connected with self education. If you want to have the best developers working on your projects then the projects should be interesting and should use the latest technologies.