Rating:  - Amazon product description is missing a critical warning
Another review touched on this problem but I think that Amazon should include the following (in a large font) at the beginning of the product description:
"Warning! This product cannot be used to upgrade from earlier Visual Studio versions such as 2003"
I am sure that most customers would assume that the purpose of the Visual Studio 2005 upgrade is to upgrade from an earlier version of Visual Studio. Amazon could avoid a lot of wasteful product returns with this warning.
Rating:  - What qualifies as an upgrade for Visual Studio 2005/DB connectivity
You may be wondering what qualifies as an upgrade vs. having to buy the base product for visual studio 2005(there's about $100 difference between the two). If you can get the microsoft site to tell you that, you search better than I do. The box which I now have tells you what you need for an upgrade. For Microsoft prior products the box says "Microsoft Visual Tools, Version 5.0 or later". I had C#/Visual Studio 2003 and that was Version 7.x. Microsoft being Microsoft, they allow upgrade from other development tools. Some mentioned were IBM Websphere, BEA WebLogic WorkShop, the Borland Development Tools, Macromedia Flash, Sun Java Studio and some others. I will just say the when I installed the Upgrade it seemed very unfussy about whether prior products were on the machine or not. I had SQL Server 2005 on there, maybe it counted that as the "prior".
I installed the $50 copy of SQL Server 2005 first, then I installed the Visual Studio 2005 upgrade. When I installed VS 2005 I unchecked the box for SQL Server 2005 Express and that worked quite well. It left my previously installed DB alone. I work a lot with DB connectivity and I have to say that VS 2005 connectivity with SQL Server 2005 is impressive. I was counting the parms in stored procedures without knowing what they were in about 10 minutes. 15 years ago you would have had to have a million dollar mainframe to have this kind of development environment and now it costs $200 on Amazon, no tax, no shipping.
Rating: - I love Amazon Premium
Our family has subscribed to Amazon premium. Sometimes that makes things simpler. With free shipping, I can look at a reliable source like Amazon and know my total cost will be reasonable.
Rating:  - Nice debugging....poor resource editor
I'm a C++ developer and I bought Visual Studio 2005 to take advantage of the resource editor, since in most other respects the free edition (Visual Studio Express) has many of the same features. I'm sorry to report that the resource editor is practically unusable, and they have yet to patch it as of this writing.
The resource editor routinely corrupts the resource file, and sometimes even refuses to save changes. I've had to resort to using my old Visual C++ 2003 just for the resource editor. If I were developing an MFC app, this would be more of a pain than it already is, but fortunately I'm doing straight Win32 development.
For the IDE itself, I have to say they've done an outstanding job. Hovering over variables in the debugger lets you browse arrays, classes, etc. and even change the values right there without having to drag to the watch window. Also, if you've tried to debug STL using 2003 you know it is impossible. They've definitely fixed this and now STL containers are easily debugged.
Overall, the debugging improvements make this a worthwhile purchase, especially if you make heavy use of STL. If you're an MFC developer or do any other development that makes heavy use of the resource editor, you might want to hold off until they've fixed the resource editor...easily the most overtly broken feature I've ever seen from Microsoft. Their testers were definitely asleep at the wheel on this one.
I'm giving it 4 stars because I'm pretty sure they'll fix it soon. Otherwise I'd give it 5.
-John
Rating: - Best Visual Studio Yet
In my opinion, the best Visual Studio version yet. Quick startup with customizable visual settings based on what language programmer you are. I found this very easy to just into .NET 2.0 C# as well as a C++ programmer, and the windows forms designer is very clean and easier to use in my opinion. The layout seems more modern and easier to use, and blends in very well with Windows Vista or Windows XP.
The upgrade edition is very nice as well, since there is a long list of products this can upgrade from, including VS6 or 7 and many competitor products, such as Borland. Easy way to save money over buying a non-upgrade edition.
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