So sometime last week I was approached by our software development manager to get some pricing information together to upgrade to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008.
If you've ever looked into purchasing this product you know first hand what a quagmire the Microsoft licensing scheme can be. There are several versions of Visual Studio 2008 and picking the right one may not be as cut and dry of a decision as one would think.
There's Visual Studio Standard which looks like its mainly for students and hobbyists. This will likely be missing key features our development team is going to need.
Then you have Visual Studio Professional. I thought this would be the one we would need, but it too is missing key features our team will need.
Okay then I see the Visual Studio Team Edition Products:
- Team Edition for Software Architects.
- Team Edition for Software Developers
- Team Edition for Software Testers
- Team Edition for Database Professionals
Our team is comprised of professional developers that where all of these hats. So I started thinking we would have to purchase the Visual Studio Team Suite for everyone. But you're talking about a $40,000 investment for a small company. There's no way we could handle that type of expense.
So now we're thinking we can get one person the $9,900 Team Suite with MSDN Premium subsription. And get everyone else the Team Suite minus the MSDN subscription. What a mess. I'm not even sure that will work for us either.
I'm curious what other shops are doing with regard to migrating to VStudio 2008. Any feedback is always welcomed.
