1. Advantages of Visual Studio 2008 over Visual C++ 6.0
•Much more standards compliant C++ compiler, with better template handling
•Support for X64/Mobile/XBOX targets
•Improved STL implementations
•Support for C++0X TR1(smart pointers, regular expressions,etv)
•Secure C runtime library
•Improved code navigation
•Improved debugger; possibility to run remote debug sessions
•Better compiler optimizations
•Many bug fixes
•Faster builds on multi-core/multi-CPU systems
•Improved IDE user interface, with many nice features
•Improved macro support in the IDE; DTE allows access to more IDE methods and variables
•Updated MFC library(in VS2008 Service Pack 1)
Disadvantages of moving to Visual Studio 2008
•The IDE is a lot slower than VS6
•Intellisense still has performance issues(replacing it with VisualAssistX can help)
•Side by side assemblies make app deployment much more problematic
•The local(offline) MSDN library is extremely slow
•As mentioned theres no profiler in the professional version