Yes, I see the point Bob.

I had previously found the VS Enterprise along with Win98 and Office97 were about all I needed. And Office97 still is adequate. But my current contract has need of Win 2000 Workstation and Visio so it looks like it really is time to take another look at it.

I guess I should take some care with the timing though to give every possibility of getting as much of the *real* .NET stuff as possible.

Thanks,

JimN

>>I am now certain that MSDN is a suitable (though significantly more expensive) alternative to VS.
>
>Jim,
>
>I wrestled with the MSDN Universal Subscription cost for quite a while. My decision to upgrade from the Library subscription came when I started adding up the cost of other programs I need/use: Office (you get the Developer Edition) and Visio. The seemingly high cost becomes a wash when you consider the entire package even though it's a big chunk of change for an independent developer.