Born to Thrive

The 70-565 exam tests developer's ability to design, develop, test and deploy .NET applications. But sometimes some tasks like writing Unit Tests, creating class, database or deployment diagrams, profiling your code, or having your source control integrated within Visual Studio are only possible with the specific version of Visual Studio 2008, and every enterprise application developer should at least be familar what version of Visual Studio 2008 is required to perform those tasks so he can propose different solutions based on the fact when certain versions of VS 2008 are not available. In last post I showed how to add private accessor to your test project to test private, internal and protected fields, but that was only possible when having at least Visual Studio 2008 Professional so as enterprise developer you should know that this solution cannot be suggested for other developers who work with Standard version of VS 2008. You can find exactly what tasks can or cannot be done within each version of Visual Studio 2008 by downloading the Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison document from here. I don't think anybody should remember the whole 35 page document but knowing being familiar with each version can help you understand the toolset you can work with and sometimes you can see what you're missing out due to having lower versions of Visual Studio. As an example, when you work with test projects in Visual Studio, you probably remember that when you add a new test, you can choose Manual Test, Ordered Test, Generic Test and Unit Test of course, but do the same in Team Suite Edition, you will also see Database Unit Test, Load Test and Web Test. Different version of Visual Studio opens the door to a whole different world of developing, testing and designing .NET applications. I don't know if there are any questions on the exam that test this, but there could be a question that asks if you need to buy some 3rd party tool to preform some web tests or maybe you need to use Visual Studio Team Suite Edition, or another question asking if you can design Entity Framework model and add it to your application when working with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition. I think those are good questions and every enterprise developer should know the answer whether the questions will be at the exam or not, as it is likely that sooner or later your manager or a co-worker asks similar question, and then you will know the answer.