Visual Studio Myths – busted wide open

Article
10/21/2009

The team and I were having a conversation about developers (we do that from time to time). It went something like:

“Isn’t it a shame that so many developers are stuck on Visual Studio 2005 when Visual Studio 2008 would be way better for them and Visual Studio 2010 is just around the corner”
“Why is that?”
<LONG CONVERSATION LISTING EVERY REASON DEVELOPERS ARE ON 2005 DELETED>
“And… then there are all these myths that developers believe to be true which hold them back from adopting Visual Studio 2008. For instance many developers believe that …”
<LONG LIST OF MYTHS DELETED>
“OK. What can we do to help them?”

Well, after several iterations of ideas on how we could do our little bit to address this, we decided to go with collating:

All the key feature improvements from Visual Studio 2005 through to Visual Studio 2010 by focus area (web, data etc)
All the myths we heard in our meetings and events, plus some we made up to pad it out :-)

And then, with a little help from an agency, we created a Silverlight 3 application which presented the information in a way that developers will hopefully find rather useful and a little prettier than the whopping bit word document we created.

The final result is the Visual Studio Myth Busting Matrix.

This is a release candidate – both of the application and the content. The Visual Studio 2010 content is based on Beta 1 and will definitely be updated for Beta 2. We are really, really keen to get your feedback. We would love to know:

If you had any problems using it.
If you found it useful.
Any myths it busted for you.
Any answers to myths you disagree with.
Whether you think it is useful format vs more traditional approaches (For instance, we could do a version for your managers to help them see why you would be more productive using the latest tools)

And most importantly any features or myths you think we missed.

Feel free to contact me through my blog, through twitter or just tweet with the tag #dotnetmyth which we will be watching.

Enjoy.

P.S. And it does have spinning balls. Which I know MikeT (See rant!) and MikeO particularly admire :-)