How to get VisualStudio 2010 cool tools without spending $12,000

Question

We are a small dev shop with 10 people, 3 of whom are currently doing .Net. The new VisualStudio 2010 tools look really nice, and we would like to use them - but it seems that many of them (historical debugging, UML tools, testing stuff) are only going to be available in the Ultimate Edition. And that costs $12,000. Or nearly forty grand for the three of us. (See here for details).

Given that the architectural visualisation tools seem to be lifted straight from NDepend, which cost around €250 each (and is excellent), we just can't justify that sort of spending.

Now, we have a normal MSDN professional subscription, but that only got us one VS Team System, and I assume will not get us three 2010 Ultimates. Given that we have no use for the whole Team Foundation Server stuff, and just want the dev tools, what can we do?

EDIT:

Here is a list of the dev tools (leaving database and "testing lab" tools for another question) which are missing from the "Professional" version. An asterisk (*) means that the feature is in the "Premium" edition, no asterisk means only available in "Ultimate". What are the non-multi-thousand-dollar alternatives?

• Testing:

  Code Coverage (*)

  Test Impact Analysis (*)

  Coded UI Test (*)

  Web Performance Testing

  Load Testing

• Debugging & Diagnostics:

  Static Code Analysis (*)

  Code Metrics (*)

  Profiling (*)

  IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)

• Architecture and Modeling:

  UML & Layer diagram viewer (*)

  Architecture Explorer

  UML 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity, Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)

  Layer Diagram and Dependency Validation

Answer 1

If you're a small dev shop, Microsoft will give you the full version of VS (and then some) for a few years. Check out the BizSpark program.

Answer 2

Like you've said, some of the tools are just copies of other tools that are already available in the market. If I were in your position I'd be looking at getting a version of Visual Studio that's covers all the basics a professional .net developer needs and then look at alternative tools. There are heaps of great open source and commercial tools that do an excellent job for free or for a reasonable price.

The best part about third party tools, in my opinion, is that they tend to be able to improve and adapt quicker than the standard Visual Studio release cycle. Things like continuous integration servers, unit testing frameworks, mocking/isolation frameworks, source control etc are often best done by third party tools so that as things change in the industry you can adapt your tools without having to wait for Microsoft.