Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)VS Pro + MSDN Premium is pretty much the sweet-spot in Microsoft's development tool subscription offerings if you're a serious individual developer who wants access to all of the MS software in a dev/test environment.
It's important to note that Amazon only sells the "Retail" license option, and if you go to one of Microsoft's official resellers (via the list on the MSDN site) you can buy the same thing through their Open license program and get a two or three year version of the MSDN Premium subscription for just slightly more than the Retail one-year subscription price!
If you have an active MSDN Premium subscription when VS 2010 launches, you'll get upgraded to the next higher tier of subscription for free (according to the MSDN and VS 2010 site) which will get you more commercial-use licenses for things like Expression Studio 3, and more of the new VS 2010 tools. See those MS sites for details.
The MSDN Premium subscription gets you access to almost all of Microsoft's software offerings of operating systems (workstations and servers), SQL Server, and their application products. Note that:
These are licensed (with a few exceptions like one full copy of Office) for Development and Testing purposes only. So if you use an MSDN Windows 7 license on your home PC and you use it for playing a game or doing your taxes or email etc., then you're in violation of the license.
They're licensed for a single named individual's unlimited use (for dev and test), so you can set up 100 huge Windows Server systems if you want, but if you have a second developer or anyone else use any of them then you're in violation of the license. You can't just buy one subscription and share the software with all your programmers.
The licences you get are perpetual (unlike with some other Microsoft programs like Empower) and do not expire when your subscription runs out. So if your subscription does expire, you can still use the versions of VS and the other software you had at that time.
If you don't need all the server OS versions and the commercial-use copy of Office, then you might consider the cheaper MSDN subscription offers. If you just want to learn to develop on Microsoft systems, then you can do a lot with the free Express editions of Visual Studio C#, C++, VB, SQL Server, etc. and you may not need to spend any money at all.
If you're a member of a big team that wants to buy completely into the Microsoft way, then there are even more ridiculously expensive team versions of the software you can buy (but you have to pay for each developer separately as here).
If you're a company developing a software product for Windows, you can sign up *very* cheaply for up to two years for the Microsoft Empower program that gives you five MSDN subscriptions and other goodies I believe (though the licenses expire at the end of the term) if you commit to shipping a commercial product within that time.
But if you're a single serious developer who wants access to pretty much the full suite of development tools (minus the fancy high-end team stuff) and all the MS operating systems, server software, applications, and you need a new version of Office for yourself, then this is the one to buy (or talk your boss into), preferably via a two or three year Open license version since it's only slightly more expensive than this one-year Retail version.
G.
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MicrosoftVisual StudioPro w/MSDN Prem 2008 Win32 English Not to Latam DVD DVD
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