Why you should plan to migrate to Visual Studio 2010 already now!

During the Inner Circle summit there is a lot of information about features of the new visual studio and about the current market situation for Microsoft Technologies. To mention every detail, I could talk probably for hours or even days.

The Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 has been released and there is how an official release date: 22 March 2009. Why should you start to think about migration now? I want to give you ten good arguments for that.

Before I start, I want to tell you how I go to these 10 arguments. We got a lot of information about features and about lots of details during this summit. We also learned a lot about the market. Some of this stuff is non-disclosure information, I can’t tell you everything. But the ten arguments, I give you is the message between the lines, perfectly legal to be communicated and Microsoft would not say it as I do in public as this contains some statements that would not pass their PR.

1. VSStudio 2010 is based on managed code
Why does this matter? Okay, there are probably some nice WPF features in the editor, but this is probably a minor argument, but no killer argument. Well, think about one thing! How many big windows client based applications do you know that are based on .NET now? We talk about big applications for mass market like Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop. Of course, we include also the big Microsoft applications such as MS Office in our list.

Most of them are still based on COM Technologies. Why? I would risk my position in the partnership program if I address my assumptions directly. With Visual Studio, Microsoft moved one of their flagships to .NET. This means that a lot of effort has been included to develop this product with .NET. During this effort, Microsoft had to target also some weaknesses in .NET that will only come up in the most extreme scenarios. So .NET 4.0 includes a lot of general improvements and fixes to solve issues that had been in the earlier releases. So postponing a migration to .NET 4.0 with the argument that a new version is not as stable as the established one is not valid this time.

2. The Team Foundation Server is now part of the complete Visual Studio offer.
Not just in Visual Studio Ultimate, but also in Premium and Professional. Why does this matter?

Let’s be honest! Managing projects without ALM, but with MS Project or even worse with pure pen and paper is like moving from one place to another with a horse carriage. It may have some aspects of nostalgia and you can enjoy your view more as you move (unless it is raining of course). But if I can get a Ferrari to get from Hagenberg to Vienna, I’d sell the horse to the slaughterhouse.

So, don’t miss your chance, to get professional issue management, version planning, release management, project controlling with VS2010.

3. More Architectural support
When we were talking about architectural support, this was really painful until now without additional non-microsoft tools. There was no real professional tool from Microsoft available that satisfied the needs of a good architectural support. If you still believe that MS Visio is good, maybe you should start with the evaluation of the new architectural features right away. Because the new architectural features contain a lot of features that other products had already years ago. You never want to work again with visio to depict UML diagrams.

I will talk about this in an upcoming blog about these features.

4. Test Tools
Apart from architects, testers had a very poor support from earlier Visual Studio versions. The new test tools are part of an initiative of Microsoft to focus enforce quality and to compete with other products. This and other improvements in the code analysis are steps forward to reduce the number of issues in your code before they reach your users or customer.

5. Extensibility
Firefox became quite popular because of its add-ons. People did not want to miss their favorite widgets and became Firefox evangelists because some functionality of the addons was not available in other browsers. This was one main reasons besides the existence of Internet Explorer 6.

Microsoft Visual studio brings a lot of extensibility options. So be prepared to get your widgets.

6. Intellitrace
Intellitrace (or historical debugging) is a new technology from Microsoft to make the debugging effort more efficient. Once you have used it, you won’t want to miss it. No static stack trace analysis of your debug session is required any more. This is really an asset and will improve your bugfixing rate. I will add a blog on this later on.

7. Multicore development
Let’s be honest. Who has just only one core in his PC? As you are reading this blog, you are definitely none of these guys who just use their PC for mail or internet. And unless you are not the victim of your boss, you will have a multicore machine.

So if performance matters, it does matter how your cores will be used. There will be a lot of features in this with Visual Studio 2010.

8. Azure and Cloud Computing
This is really a big asset. Cloud Computing is the future. So move to Visual Studio 2010, you can be ready to move to the cloud whenever you want.

9. Ultimate offer
Everybody with an MSDN subscription receive equal or better edition in exchange. If you have for instance a Team Edition, you will get an Ultimate Edition. Don’t miss that chance.

10. Go Live License
There is a Go Live License on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This means: Microsoft will support you, when you want to migrate to the final version in March, 22 2010. So if you start a new project now, you spare a lot of effort to migrate later.

Of course, a Beta is still a Beta. There are some drawbacks. I have to be honest, during a migration of a project to Beta 2, I experienced some crashes, but on the other hand, I had a performance gain and my productivity increased with Entity Framework 2.0, Intellitrace and other features. Another drawback is memory consumption. The beta 2 is still using more memory than Visual Studio 2008. The developers of microsoft want to change that. A goal is to use less memory than VS2008 (as the code base and the complexity of VS2010 is already smaller than 2008)

My recommended strategy is: Move to Visual Studio Beta 2 now, if you want to create new projects and if you do not have restrictions to use a specific Visual Studio version. You won’t regret it.

Hagenberg Software is looking forward to support you with your migration. No matter if you want to migrate now or in March. We have a lot of experience with migration in general and we will include VS2010 now to our new developments. In addition to this, we are using the Team Foundation Server since the first release.

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