Visual Studio 2008: Is it worth the upgrade from 2005?

Question

As of the fall of 2008 I'm about to embark on a new development cycle for a major product that has a winforms and an asp.net interface. We use Telerik, DevExpress and Infragistics components in it and all are going to have a release within a month or so which will be the one I target for our spring release of our product.

They all support VS2005 and we will continue to target .net 2+ so I can't see any compelling reason so far to upgrade to VS2008.

Has anyone found a compelling reason for upgrading to VS2008?

Answer 1

It's worth it. It's faster, the designer is vastly improved (split view, faster context switching), it has better support for javascript and when you're ready to target 3.5, you'll be ready to go.

Answer 2

These are Microsoft's 10 reasons to upgrade (.DOC):

1. LINQ support
2. Same designer elements as Microsoft Expression (Web and Blend)
3. AJAX and WCF/REST
4. Better WPF support
5. Improved MSTEST (also included in Professional edition)
6. Improved HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editors
7. Choose from Project settings which version of the framework to target
8. Improved Office dev tools, including ribbon UI and Click-Once support
9. Integrated WCF and WWF support
10. Better performance and stability

Answer 3

Yes, it's definately worth the upgrade. I would actaully say go straight to VS2008 SP1 as well. There have been a lot of IDE improvements (usability features and speed) and improvements in the web development experience as well including better JS and CSS support.

Answer 4

If you have a release within a month, I'd suggest not upgrading. Make the upgrade to 2k8 part of the next major release ... no reason you should risk something not working quite the same or some other complication if everything is working as is.