Rob Caron's voice of sanity on VS 2005 Pricing
Rob seems to have taken it upon himself to explain Visual Studio 2005's pricing to the world. THANK YOU Rob! This latest post expands his product breakdown, which was also fabulous, other than he should have started it with the words "Don't Panic", written in large friendly letters at the top of the post ;-)
One thing I want to draw your attention to is the piece about VS Pro 2005 containing most of the features that Enterprise Architect has today. This is particularly true if you get MSDN Premium. For example, if you have an MSDN Universal today, and don't care a thing about VSTS, then you can just opt for VS Pro + MSDN Premium and you get pretty much all the features you have today - including Visio with UML (if you think that's a good thing). And it's CHEAPER!
Rob also makes a very keen point at the end that you should seriously consider getting MSDN subscriptions. Obviously, Microsoft is trying to drive more to subscription-based revenue models, as it helps their cashflow projections. While I have no interest in Microsoft's cashflow, or what their shareholders think, the MSDN package is very attractive. You get developer licenses for just about every server product, which makes licensing test and dev servers for your team very easy and cost effective (assuming everyone has MSDN). When you factor in the cost of MS Office as well, you can save quite a bit of money. The places that see the most benefit of this are the "Microsoft shops", where they use SQL Server, and other MS server products, such as Biztalk, SharePoint, etc. If that's the type of place you work, you can actually cut down on all those dev and test licenses on those server products pretty easily, not to mention you don't have to worry about your developers being legal. Anyway, obviously I'm a huge fan of MSDN. Most software licensing plans (including Microsoft's ) are meant to confuse people and remove as much money from your pocket as possible - MSDN really seems like a great value to me.