Best version of Visual Studio for C++ development on Windows7?

[d000hg]

I have been happily using VC++ 2008 since I started doing freelance work and signed up for MAPS. But it's probably finally time to upgrade - initially I put off moving to 2010 as many open-source projects only offered 2k8 binaries, and many developers were also on older versions, but now it's the opposite and more and more projects are dropping 2k5/8 support.

I work on Win7 and plan to stay on Win7 for the foreseeable future, so which version is best for me? 2010, 2012 or 2013?

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Express version of 2013 now includes C++ & C# together rather than separate applications - I do dabble in C# sometimes.

For my work, I reckon the Express version is probably good enough but I would miss my SVN and WholeTomato plugins - or does modern VC++ finally offer VCS integration and C++ refactoring out of the box?

[lilelvis2000]

I use VS Pro 2013 - its full of bugs. A move up to VS 2012 would be well worth it. I use Ankh SVN plugin with out issues in either version.

[VectraMan]

I use 2012 at PermiCo and that's pretty buggy. I'm meant to be using 2013 but IT seem unable to sort out my MSDN account.

But for my Plan B work at home I still use 2005,and never have any issues with that.

Of course everything 2010 and later gets you the new, grey, dog slow, WPF interface, though I think Moore's law has now got us to the point where a decent high end i7 almost makes it acceptable.

But, you do get the newer C++ features like lambdas, which is probably the best reason to upgrade and keep your skills up to date.

No add in in Express. I don't use them anyway, I prefer TortoiseSVN and never get on with refactoring tools.

[d000hg]

I never had any problems with the 2010 GUI, even back in 2010-11. I work over RDP on a rack-mounted VM slice and it still works OK!

Main reason to ditch 2008 is to escape NCB hell for me

Tortoise is my favourite too - I use it for Git and Mercurial too. I generally find VCS plugins are intrusive and buggy but VisualSVN is actually excellent, it's the only one I would choose to use over Tortoise/command-line.

[VectraMan]

Main reason to ditch 2008 is to escape NCB hell for me

And join SDF hell? Every few days or so I 1. close all the windows, 2. shutdown Visual Studio, 3. delete the SDF file, and restart. That speeds things up no end. For a while. I wouldn't mind so much if Intellisense actually worked.

With old Visual Studio I used to replace the NCB with a zero byte file and make it read only. That'd shut it up.

[d000hg]

I hadn't heard of that - I thought a big improvement was that finally intellisense DID work in 2010?