<ChristophDotNet

You know the funniest thing about Europe? It's the little differences ... as we learned from John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

Jon Box (Architect Evangelist extraordinaire) thought my post discussing risk differences between Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 was a "Nice Job", but he actually did have a few comments on the new mobile-related features. He was right on, but he's too busy to post them. Let me do that it for him.

How do you give directions to friends? How many times do you tell them, if you see the Starbucks you've gone too far -- maybe Starbucks is bad example because they are everywhere, but you get the point. It's a really useful way to give directions.

Finally, the Popfly beta is available to the general public! What's Popfly, you ask? It's the mashup tool for the Silverlight generation and a community site to go with it.

There's been a lot of Zune / Microsoft bashing because of the DRM feature. Now yesterday, I needed to move songs that I bought on Zune marketplace from my old PC to my new PC. (There were some songs on Guitar Hero II that I couldn't get out of my head). Having read about all the negative DRM press and listening to my son's stories about how complicated it is to move songs on iTunes, I thought I was in for somewhat of a challenge.

I think people yacking on their bluetooth headsets in public places are rude. People also didn't care much for me calling them on my last  headset because half the time they couldn't understand what I was saying. With all of that I really didn't care much for replacing it after an unnamed member of my family washed it one day.

Technorati Profile

Should I stay or should I go … with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 is the question in this particular case. One of my customers is still on Visual Studio 2003 and they are wondering whether to upgrade to VS 2005 or to VS 2008.

Are there reasons for moving to VS 2005 instead of 2008 even though 2008 is so close to release? Minimizing risk is probably the major driver for deciding on VS 2005. After all, it’s been out in the market for almost two years and it’s stable and mature. There’s also the common wisdom that you shouldn’t deploy a Microsoft product that doesn’t have at least one service pack. Mind you that SP1 for Visual Studio didn’t come out until 12 months after the release of the product. Microsoft is no longer in the mode where the Service Pack has to hit 6 months after release because there were quality issues that needed to be fixed.

When it comes to determining to move to the newer Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 there are more points to consider:

1) Stability and maturity of the underlying framework and consequently the applications you’re building on top of the framework.

2) Stability and maturity of new features added with VS 2008

3) Product Support differences.

4) Productivity benefits of VS 2008 compared to VS 2005.

Read more...