Letters to the Editor -- Visual Studio Magazine

Path to a Better IDE

By Readers of Visual Studio Magazine
08/01/2010

Peter Vogel's June column, "Upgrading to Visual Studio 2010," got readers talking about plugs-ins and pricing.

Another great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is Visual Studio Gallery! There are almost 2,000 extensions out there already with little gems like Open Data Protocol Visualizer, VSCommands 2010 and RegexEditor!

Archi
Submitted via Internet

I enjoyed the article but found one error -- the upgrade pricing is misleading. Owners of Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard Edition are indeed eligible to purchase Visual Studio 2010 Pro without MSDN as an upgrade for $299. That's a pretty good deal. On the other hand, those of us who have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Pro without MSDN are forced to buy the $549 Visual Studio 2010 Pro with MSDN "Essentials" upgrade. If this were a full-blown version of MSDN, that would seem more than reasonable, but it's not. Once the one-year "trial" is over, you lose the right to continue to use any OSes or servers that you installed from MSDN Essentials. What's more, you can't directly upgrade prior editions of Visual Studio Pro without MSDN to Visual Studio 2010 Pro with MSDN "full." Instead, you have to buy the full retail version for $1,199. So the upgrade is a good deal for prior Visual Studio Standard licensees, but not so much for prior Visual Studio Pro without MSDN licensees.

Bryan Morris
Submitted via Internet

Easy Access
In his July 2010 Redmond Review column, "SharePoint Is the New Access," Andrew Brust applauds the Access 2010 team for the new Web database facility, and ponders the lack of similar advances for Visual Studio and .NET. "Why is all this so complex that it takes a product team in the Office group to integrate it and simplify it?" he asks.

.NET is too complex???? Are you kidding??? Compared to other languages, .NET is a dream.

Sam
Submitted via Internet

If you have ever developed or use any J2EE application framework, you would not complain that .NET is too complex. Microsoft better change the stupid name though. Only a marketing weenie at Microsoft could have come up with that name.

Anonymous
Submitted via Internet

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This story was written or compiled based on feedback from the readers of Visual Studio Magazine.

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