@ - S.T.A.R.S. after reading your huge post and trying to get your point about the different sizes etc.. i think am able to give you an answer but before that i have one question for you... why the hell do you need all those VS versions????
now to your question... for me the best one is VS 2008 with .net 3.5 SP1 wondering why?? the reason for that is because while coding @ES iīve checked some stuff added in .net 3.5 SP1 where in most of the cases i got a huge speed gain in many areas so it seems like MS is indeed working to make this language the #1... if they will reach that goal well only the time will tell i think.
VS lower than 2005 are useless for me if you ask me.. most of the stuff were not really mature and because of that i even hated .net and C# in the past because after my first try with 2002 i just said WTF is that??? anyways things has changed and VS 2005 changed lots of stuff anyways the most advanced version is 2008 and thatīs a fact.... it includes lots of fixes and changes that the very first version should have had at that time but thatīs the life and things keep progressing with the time.
i myself am not caring much about old OS compatibilities because people keep moving and there are only few that still use those OS nowdays so why care??? only if necessary i would say. so again VS2008 is the way to go and if you need to reduce size there are few tools that allows compression and even encryption of your apps so that people canīt decompile them... if you want an example of a .net protected app download my pnach tool from the news thread and try to decompile .exe
as you will notice thereīs no way to get the code back
so forget all those older version and keep coding in VS2008(my opinion)
........... happy coding
@ruantec
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Current development tools:
Visual C++.net, Visual C#.net
Visual VB.net, Visual Webdeveloper.net
Bloodshed Dev C++, Borland C++
Visual Basic 6
Last edited by @ruantec; June 5th, 2009 at 17:36..