Visual Studio: Help Me Decide

[Joseph Witchard]

For someone who aspires to be a freelance web developer/software developer, which version of Microsoft Visual Studio do you think would be the best choice? Standard or Professional? I've read the differences between them, but I'm still unsure.

[drhowarddrfine]

Hmm. As a web developer of many years, I've never used it even though I've been given a copy.

[Joseph Witchard]

I had the student version when I was in school. I never once used it for web development either, but my friends in school said that it was the standard program that colleges used to teach computer programming with.

[NogDog]

If you plan on working mainly with PHP and have the money to spend on Visual Studio, then you might instead want to consider Zend Studio (http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/). But if you want to get into MS-based stuff like .NET, the VS may well be worthwhile. I suspect the 'standard' version would be sufficient for most web programming projects, as this page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/cc149003.aspx) seems to indicate that the two main things the "pro" version adds are advanced testing capabilities and features for specific Windows applications.

[Joseph Witchard]

If I buy VS, I don't have any plans (at this point) to use it for web development. I like to do regular programming, too. I've studied Visual Basic, and I'm planning on learning Java and C (but I do know that VS doesn't have Java; I would need something like NetBeans for that). What I was asking is which version would be best for a person who would like to do web development AND program development for a living. ;)

[KDLA]

The Professional version is a huge memory hog; even worse if you use the (separate) help library. Install with care.

[Joseph Witchard]

The Professional version is a huge memory hog; even worse if you use the (separate) help library. Install with care.

So you think standard would be a better choice?

[KDLA]

As NogDog said, the standard would probably be enough; it just depends on how reliant of the product's features you'll be. We have some programmers here that can't live without it (because the product does most of the "thinking" for them), and others who only use it as an editor, coding manually.

[NogDog]

And depending on what you want to do, languages you want to use, personal preferences, etc., there are other alternatives to VS such as Delphi (http://www.codegear.com/products), or even open-source IDEs such as NetBeans (http://www.netbeans.org/) and the various Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/)-based solutions.

[Joseph Witchard]

Are any of the development tools better than one or the other?

[scragar]

Are any of the development tools better than one or the other?

Zend is recommend for PHP work, since it's made by the same people who made PHP, so it's got lot's of features, while keeping things clean, well worth trying.

Personally I don't use a development tool like that, I'm more than happy with quanta, it does everything I want, and thanks to a few custom plugins, it does more than any other tool I have tried(out of those I tried I do like eclipse though, it takes a lot of configuring to get it running how you want it though, don't approach it assuming it will be exactly what you want the instant you start).

[NogDog]

Which is better? Heh...get a bunch of programmers together in a room to select which language, operating system, and IDE should be used for a project, and they'll come to a consensus on the first two long before they agree - if ever - on the IDE. ;)