This is a tough question to answer b/c the upgrade has many new features and some may or may not be useful to you depending upon your needs. So this is something that has to be decided by your review. However...

A couple things you mentioned specifically are whether the VS 2005 version is "Crystal Lite". Yes and No. VS 2005 and CR standalone use two different code bases during development. I think they used the CR 10 code base when they branched off to create VS 2005. So you don't have the cool new features of CR XI. However, CR 10 is a HUGE improvement over VS 2003 and they don't specifically remove features that I know of. It's more of an issue that you are working with the previous release of the software.

Another question you had was that if you buy CR XI standalone, can you develop reports in CR and then call them from VS 2005. The answer is yes. You have to download CR XI R2 b/c you need new DLLs to make VS 2005 recognize CR XI reports. But if you download the latest service packs and R2 then you'll be fine.

Re the Developer edition, yes you get a lot more with that purchase. Re price, if you are a VS 2005 owner then you get a price discount compared to just buying the Developer edition at a store. I think it saves you one or two hundred dollars, but you need to check on this yourself b/c I haven't looked in a long time.

Oh yeah - the coolest thing about Crystal Reports XI is that it lets you build Dynamic Cascading Prompts (DCPs). This lets you tie the prompts to a database and the list of values changes based upon the user's previous choices. Many programmers have been writing custom code to do this in forms and now this is no longer necessary. This feature alone is worth the upgrade if you ask me!

If you have specific concerns about a feature, just download the 30 day trial versions from the Business Objects website. This will give you ample time to research the features of the XI and Developer editions.