Justifying Visual Studio upgrade for REST API project

Question

Our group does not primarily develop in c#/.NET, but a few years ago we picked up a couple of licenses for Visual Studio 2008 for a few projects. Since we do not develop full time in .NET, we have not upgraded Visual Studio since then.

There is a project coming where we need to develop a web application that contains a REST API. We have been looking at all of the documentation that deals with creating REST APIs. It appears that while VS 2008 is capable of creating APIs (with WCF), later versions of Visual Studio seem to have much better support for creating REST APIs (ASP.Net Web API).

My questions are:

1. Would upgrading to Visual Studio 2012 or 2013 make that much of a difference in the development/maintenance of an API, or is Visual Studio 2008 sufficient?
2. How can we go about justifying an upgrade in our Visual Studio licenses (if needed)?
3. We don't want to justify an upgrade by just saying "it is newer so it is better". Are there any documents that show how Visual Studio 2012 or 2013 is much better at creating REST APIs than Visual Studio 2008?

Answer 1

Not sure if is enough to justify the money but here are some reasons to adopt Visual Studio 2013:

• With Visual Studio 2008 you are restricted to .NET Framework 3.5 or lower. If you upgrade you have access to 4.0, 4.5 and future 5.0
• If you use Framework 4.5 you can use new REST API Framework.
• You can use latest versions of MVC.
• You can use latest Microsoft Entity Framework versions (old version can be used in Framework 3.5.1 but you really want the latest version as it has important performance improvement)
• You can benefit from ASP.NET WebAPI.
• WCF was a way of improving web services, but not the best one. I would avoid WCF if possible.

What is Web API?

ASP.NET Web API is a framework for building web APIs on top of the .NET Framework. You can use the new MVC4 (ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application project)

using Web API template.

Answer 2

You can actually get Visual Studio 2013 express for free and build all the web API's you'd like. The paid versions include lots of enterprise features and plugin support.

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-express-vs.aspx