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

I like the IDE supports for creating apps with bellow new technologies

• LINQ
• Silverlight
• WPF
• ASP.NET MVC

Answer 2

I'll disagree with the last post a bit. The stability for me has not been greatly increased. I've had 2K8 lock up on me in the middle of a build. wtf? But all in all, I like this version namely because of linq. Now I loved the introduction of generics in 2005, but linq make 2008 worth it and then some.

Answer 3

There are tons of improvements. The best part is you can continue to target .Net 2.0 with VS 2008 (Multi-Targeting) and use all the new IDE features.

Posting couple of screencasts but you can find more on web:

Script intellisense and debugging in Visual Studio 2008

Multi-threading Debugging Enhancements in Visual Studio 2008

Answer 4

One big feature that I benefitted greatly from in my last job: improved stability. We had a highly threaded application that would cause VS2005 to just blow up (in a number of various fashions). The switch over to 2008 decreased such occurrences by 100-fold.

Also -- VS2005 takes a lot more RAM for the same project than VS2008. At least with large solutions (e.g. 50 projects). This, I think, makes VS2008 a lot snappier / responsive that VS2005 ever was for me.

Yeah it is worth the upgrade -- just from a simple stability factor.