Visual Studio 2005 vs 2008 - What are the benefits?

Question

What are the benefits of upgrading from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008?

Any thoughts on whether it\'s worth the jump, or is it better to wait for whatever\'s coming next

Answer 1

My favorite new feature: when an Intellisence option box is showing, you can hold down control to make it semi-transparent and see the code behind it. There are tons of bigger new features and reasons to switch, but that one is a real win for me.

Answer 2

If you're just looking to upgrade to "most" of the new features of the 3.0 and/or 3.5 frameworks, it is not necessary to upgrade Visual Studio. You can just upgrade your framework. However, there are some advantages, like a new compiler (necessary to use Linq, if I recall), and some nice improvements like JavaScript debugging.

There are plenty of good articles on this exact topic out there, including this one, 22 New Features of Visual Studio 2008, that you may want to check out.

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

Check out this question... it has been discussed before.

Though I will repeat that the main thing I love about VS 2008 is their use of the Expression Web GUI for Web App development. It is far superb to what VS2K5 had.

Answer 4

Vertical split between HTML and Preview screens. Especially handy on widescreen monitors.

Answer 5

The code generated by the typed dataset designers is a bit cleaner and neater, especially when working with SQL Compact Edition databases.

Answer 6

2008 includes the ability to step into the .Net framework.