This article is not going to dive into the features of Visual Studio since that would be a book unto itself. To be fair, Ultimate offers significantly more capabilities over Professional. To give you an idea of cost differences, you could choose to buy 11 copies of Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, or for the same price one copy of Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN. Today, there are multiple versions of Visual Studio available, and yes, as you add features, it adds to the cost. I will also include Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Lab Manager with Visual Studio for simplification purposes.

Yes, this is the toolset your developers will use to design and test your organizations custom software. Microsoft Visual Studio is a world class software development tool which provides robust application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities. So when you look at the SKU level, Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN is a single SKU from a license entitlement perspective. The exception is that Visual Studio Professional can be purchased without an MSDN subscription. The only way to acquire a new copy of Visual Studio is to purchase it with an MSDN Subscription, with one exception. We first need to separate Visual Studio and MSDN. When most of us hear someone say those four letters “MSDN,” we automatically picture a software developer in our mind, but how many of you would also picture a system administrator? My guess is not many! So, why would I ever assign an MSDN to my system administrator? To answer that question we need do some level setting. In today’s world of cloud, modern MSDN is evolving rapidly around cloud services, and that will continue to accelerate. Keep in mind that much of Microsoft’s early success was based on winning over developers, so it is no surprise the degree of effort Microsoft has put into MSDN over the years. As the product has matured over the years, adoption has soared. Over my 15 years at Microsoft, I experienced many new MSDN launches, and each brought new and exciting features. The Microsoft Developer Network, better known as MSDN, is one of Microsoft’s most fascinating and misunderstood products.

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