title: How to get VisualStudio 2010 cool tools without spending $12,000
body: <p>We are a small dev shop with 10 people, 3 of whom are currently doing .Net. The new VisualStudio 2010 tools look really nice, and we would like to use them - but it seems that many of them (historical debugging, UML tools, testing stuff) are only going to be available in the Ultimate Edition. And that costs $12,000. Or nearly forty grand for the three of us.
  (See <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19/visual_studio_2010_second_beta_packaging/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> for details).</p>
  
  <p>Given that the architectural visualisation tools seem to be lifted straight from <a href="http://www.ndepend.com/Purchase.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NDepend</a>, which cost around €250 each (and is excellent), we just can't justify that sort of spending.</p>
  
  <p>Now, we have a normal MSDN professional subscription, but that only got us one VS Team System, and I assume will not get us three 2010 Ultimates. Given that we have no use for the whole Team Foundation Server stuff, and just want the dev tools, what can we do? </p>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>Here is a list of the dev tools (leaving database and "testing lab" tools for another question) which are missing from the "Professional" version. An asterisk (*) means that the feature is in the "Premium" edition, no asterisk means only available in "Ultimate". What are the non-multi-thousand-dollar alternatives? </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p><strong>Testing:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Code Coverage   (*) </p>
  
  <p>Test Impact Analysis   (*)</p>
  
  <p>Coded UI Test   (*)</p>
  
  <p>Web Performance Testing</p>
  
  <p>Load Testing</p></li>
  <li><p><strong>Debugging &amp; Diagnostics:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Static Code Analysis   (*)</p>
  
  <p>Code Metrics   (*)</p>
  
  <p>Profiling   (*)</p>
  
  <p>IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger)</p></li>
  <li><p><strong>Architecture and Modeling:</strong></p>
  
  <p>UML &amp; Layer diagram viewer   (*)</p>
  
  <p>Architecture Explorer</p>
  
  <p>UML 2.0 Compliant Diagrams (Activity,
  Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component)</p>
  
  <p>Layer Diagram and Dependency
  Validation</p></li>
  </ul>