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

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 2

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 3

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 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

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

• LINQ
• Silverlight
• WPF
• ASP.NET MVC

Answer 8

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.