Ravenwolfe

Moderator
I have an opportunity to get Visual Studio for free through Dreamspark. I can get any version I want.

Any suggestions on which to get? Would Ultimate be overkill for someone who is just learning VS? Professional? 2012 or 2013?

Keep in mind that I'm pretty new to VS and don't do programming professionally, just as a hobby.
 
I'm also just using it for UO hobby-ish stuff, and I went with 13 Ultimate. I love it, but I was "fairly" familiar with 12 Express prior to getting it. I would say whichever you end up getting, get Resharper as well, its well worth having.
 
Get Ultimate, it's not overkill - you'd be very surprised at the actual lack of features in the lesser versions.
They are aesthetically the same though, but ReSharper seems to be more compatible with Ultimate than other versions like Express, etc.
 
Get Ultimate, it's not overkill - you'd be very surprised at the actual lack of features in the lesser versions.
They are aesthetically the same though, but ReSharper seems to be more compatible with Ultimate than other versions like Express, etc.

I actually found the opposite with ReSharper. It bogged the whole environment down when I was using 2013 ultimate so I switched to professional.

I have not come up against any real limitations either on pro vs ultimate. I am sure you would be more versed in that though and would use the advanced features in ultimate.

Express cannot use ReSharper at all or any extensions for that matter due to the lack of the extension system in it.

OP definitely go for 2013. 2012 was horrible. As for the edition I myself prefer professional as I found ultimate bloated and contained too many features I would not use anyway. Of course everyone is different and Ultimate may suit you.
 
I´m using Ultimate, back then used Professional and wanted to refactor class hierarchys and relations of some of my private projects and noticed ultimate owns the features i missed. So using Ultimate..
 
I use Ultimate 2012 with the "Blue" theme that makes it look and feel like previous versions.
Also found a registry key edit that turns off the SHOUTING MENUS, making them camel-cased.

I won't upgrade to 2013 due to the fact that ReSharper behaves in some very odd ways with it sometimes, I've been on TeamViewer with clients that use it and it's done nothing but annoy me hehe.
 
I can get more than one so I'm gonna grab 2012 Ultimate like Voxpire suggested and learn on that one. Then download 2013 as well for future use, I've read that its really designed for Windows 8.1 and I'm still using Win7 for now. Plus I want to use Resharper and it sounds like it works better with 2012.

Thank you all!
 
I can get more than one so I'm gonna grab 2012 Ultimate like Voxpire suggested and learn on that one. Then download 2013 as well for future use, I've read that its really designed for Windows 8.1 and I'm still using Win7 for now. Plus I want to use Resharper and it sounds like it works better with 2012.

Thank you all!

Everyone has their own preferences but I am using 2013 and am using resharper with no problems. I also would not say it is geared towards 8.1 users. It just has functionality to create apps for the 8.1 app store. Intellisense features are also better in my opinion on 2013. The editor itself also has improvements such as automatic brackets although some people hate that feature.
 
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