Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent value, industry standard.
Comment: In Visual Studio Express (free from Microsoft), you can try out the development environment and work with C#, Visual J+, Visual Basic, and C++. That is a great introduction and is all many people will need. Professional IT people developers, and serious students working in development will benefit from the industry-standard full edition.
Moving to the full Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition is well worth the money for the improvements in functionality. Here you get SQL Server Developer Edition (all the funtionality of Enterprise Edition, but license limited to development purposes). This includes Integration Services (import and transform data), Analysis Services (multidimensional processing), and Reporting Services (advanced intractive reports), all three omitted from Express Editions, as well as the full SQL 2005 database engine. It is fair to note that SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition can be purchased as stand-alone software for under $50, an incredible bargain, but that obviously is not the full Visual Studio package for developing applications.
In addition, the full Visual Studio supports Visual Studio Tools for Office (VISTO - now a free download), for programming solutions for Microsoft Office applications, and supports adding third party plug-in software, while the Express Edition does not. Just remember to budget for books and training, and to make time to use the online education from Microsoft. The VS interface does not put everything in the menus. You need to know when and where to right-click, and how the myriad components relate to each other. And plan for the next upgrade too, probably coming in 2008 per the Microsoft web site.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Slow, flawed, not ready
Comment: On paper, Visual Studio 2005 looks great. Even when initially installed on your PC, it's an amazing product. It's breadth of helpful tools will turn your head. But, when put to the test of real-world development, Visual Studio stumbles terribly, then falls to its' knees. VS 2005, even with SP1, is just not ready for real-world development. Let me give a few examples.
The user interface becomes maddeningly slow on any project with more than a few hundred lines of code. If you have split your development up into multiple projects, you end up having to 'unload' them (i.e. - not having them compile) in order to be productive. The IDE will go 'out to lunch' for up to a minute for no apparent reason. There's no indication or feed back of what it is doing other than pegging your hard disk light and freezing up the IDE.
Text input is such a basic element for any development tool, so it is amazing that Visual Studio develops a disturbing keyboard stutter at the most inopportune and unpredictable times. When you are deep in the middle of a development cycle: typing code, compiling, running, and debugging, suddenly each keypress will take 3-5 seconds to appear on the screen. You are stopped dead in your tracks. Going forward is impossible. Everyone hoped Service Pack 1 would fix the slowness of text input, but it hasn't.
You have to ask yourself, "what good is an IDE that doesn't allow you to input code?" And everyone knows that the answer is, "none". Some of the suggested work-arounds include: closing all the form designers (if they are even working), turning off the navigation bar, or restart the application. But the only one that actually works is restarting Visual Studio 2005. Since it can take up to a minute and a half to start an Enterprise scale project, it's just not a viable solution (you are going to be restarting *often*).
Microsoft really needs to re-evaluate their management of this product. Such deep flaws in the design of their premiere development tool does not instill the kind of confidence a developer demands of their tools when developing a professional application. Development tools are bought by the people that intend to produce products *for* Microsoft's operating systems. Without these products, the operating system becomes meaningless, because there would be nothing useful for end-users to do. Why has Microsoft crippled one of the most important legs of their business, and why can't they fix it?
It appears that they have abandoned VS 2005 and are putting all their efforts into their next release. It's rather convenient for them. In order to get a version of Visual Studio that is actually useful, you'll need to pony up another $800. Now that's a business model I'd like to get into: produce a deeply flawed product, then charge more for the fix.
Microsoft needs to fix the product that they have already released, not the next one that they want to sell. If you are just developing a small in-house app, or creating something with a couple of thousand lines of code, then you're probably okay buying VS 2005, but if you are trying to produce a large, Enterprise-sized, commercial-quality application be warned: you are going to face some serious challenges from this product.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Leap Forward
Comment: I've been using the product for several months now for both web and winforms development, professional and personal. I run it on a three year old Dell laptop, with an Athlon 4 processor. It has occasionally been slow, especially when I was working on a half million line winforms application I'd ported from VB6. That said, I had far fewer speed problems than some collegues, my laptop having 1 Gb RAM, and them only 500Mb.
I find this version of Visual Studio lacks many of the bugs and glitches of 2003, and I really like the enhancements to ASP.NET development such as Master Pages, Generics, and the ability to use Atlas/AJAX components as web controls.
All in all this is a fantastic step forward for the developer, just make sure you have as much RAM as possible. A Service Pack in the near future would probably be helpful too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2005 Upgrade
Comment: Useful, adds important new features.
Highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great development tool
Comment: By far more superior than Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual Studio 2000. Much more along the lines of a development tool built for developers not for marketing the product. I have coded in both C# and VB using this tool and found it to be the most far superior of any other development tool I have used.
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