VS 2003 vs VS2005 and VS 2005 Pro

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    • VS 2003 vs VS2005 and VS 2005 Pro

      Hi Guys,

      Me again! I am thinking about upgrading from VS 2003 to VS 2005 and even upgrading to VS 2005 Professional and would like to get some feed back and comments. I guess my first question would be; is it worth it? Are there disadvatages/advatages to making the upgrade. Also, what about VS 2005 Pro, whats the diff. between the standard edition and the Pro edition? If anyone here uses VS 2005 or the Pro edition, please let me know and provide some comments about either.



      Thanks again,

      Me

    • RE: VS 2003 vs VS2005 and VS 2005 Pro

      I have VS2005. As a hobbiest user, I don't see much advantage over VS2003. The only reason I have it is that it was a freebie for attending a seminar. Unless there is a particular feature that you need for a project, I don't think the $ is justified.

      The story might be different in an enterprise setting.

    • RE: VS 2003 vs VS2005 and VS 2005 Pro

      I have 2005 Professional and it's pretty good. I don't think the upgrades have been that big for C/C++ users writing native code. If i were you i'd sit out this upgrade and look again when the next version hits.
      That said I know many people that love this edition

      gb

    • I'd agree, it's not worth the upgrade. There're a lot of of features that I really like in 2005 over .NET 2003, but I'm not sure how they're worth it to you.

      Some of the cool things are being able to actually debug STL containers easily, which is awesome. We use the STL everywhere in our game, and debugging in .NET 2003 was a royal pain.

      The build times have been improved, for us at least. If I'm correct the compiler is a bit more compliant with the standard. It has the whole .NET Framework 2.0 thing, but as was previously mentioned it doesn't affect native code.

      One of the biggest things for me is to be able to save my files during a build. There were some awesomely long build times on our game at one point, and I would start fixing errors during the build. Every time I would try to save, though, .NET 2003 would refuse to save while building. It was very annoying. VS2005 fixes this.

      Either way, I'd still say it's probably not worth the money unless you can somehow get into the MS Corporate Store and get the software for cheap.
      Feel you safe and secure in the protection of your pants . . . but one day, one day there shall be a No Pants Day and that shall be the harbinger of your undoing . . .

    • The refactoring support in vs2005 is also very nice, compared to the vs2003.net support (which is non-existent). But I've heard that other IDEs have far more powerful refactoring capabilities that vs2005.

      VS2005 is nice, but I'm also still using the vs2003 because there is no reason to upgrade fore me (as a hobby developer).

    • We use Visual Studio 2005 Professional here. Other than the STL debugging support (which is awesome) and few other bells & whistles (like graying out code that's not being compiled due to preprocessor #ifdef's), I haven't noticed a huge difference. I don't remember why we ended up shifting to 2005; it happened right around the time I started here.

      -Rez

    • STL debugging support would do it for me....you get really lost without it.
      Mr.Mike
      Author, Programmer, Brewer, Patriot