Benny Sutton is 4 hire - just click here

Why keep two different versions of Visual Studio on your dev machine?

I like to have the latest version of Visual Studio full my production environment but I always like keep an older version of VS around for my production server

Why?

Because I can have two windows open and not get confused which server I am on and what I am working on.

I pin my latest version to the taskbar and only open the older (production server) version from Start so straight away the two are split across two ends of the taskbar.

It further helps to avoid confusion if you set the environments up differently on the two version. On my development Visual Studio I have the server explorer panes on the right and on the production Visual Studio version I have them on the left

Another advantage of having two Visual Studio versions open at the same time is each has a different like on the taskbar, something else to prevent confusion.

I have never (yet) overwritten the wrong files by mistake using this strategy!