4 ms·

The whole "C#, VS and MSDN reek of licenses" is getting a bit staid. I'm writing a thick client/desktop app (almost 300k LoC) using Visual Studio Express , SQL

The whole "C#, VS and MSDN reek of licenses" is getting a bit staid. I'm writing a thick client/desktop app (almost 300k LoC) using Visual Studio Express , SQL Express and online MSDN. Yes, I paid money for Windows and Office, but that has little bearing on being able to write shrink-wrap quality apps with free tools from Microsoft.

hackula1 13y ago
I left the .Net world about 3 years ago. There were plenty of things to complain about, but licensing was never one of them. Most of the stack is free until you get to the point where you should be able to pay for it anyway.
- chc 13y ago
  I recently decided it might be worthwhile to learn the Microsoft stack, and had heard similar things about how you can just get whatever you need for free until you've scaled up. So I went poking around Microsoft's site for this free stuff. Half an hour later I gave up without having gotten my hands on anything but an impenetrable white paper about different versions of Visual Studio. So it seems that either people are exaggerating how free this stuff is or Microsoft is very good at hiding this.
  - adolfojp 13y ago
    1. Go to the Visual Studio website: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/ http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/ 2. Click on the Products menu 3. Click on Express 2012 products 4. There is no step 4
    - chc 13y ago
      Ah, I didn't realize that when people say they give their stuff for free, they meant they're giving a different product away for free. That is…weird. I can't figure out what this includes. Is this actually enough to deploy a web app with the full Microsoft stack?
      - jaredsohn 13y ago
        > they meant they're giving a different product away for free To get the other software free, you need to sign up for BizSpark (which requires jumping through a few hoops). http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ The express apps should be sufficient for building apps (I'm using them for a desktop app right now) and should allow you to learn the Microsoft stack with minimal effort.
      - adolfojp 13y ago
        It is fairly normal for companies that produce commercial products to offer different editions of their products at different price points. Microsoft is not a weird exception. The Express products are completely functional although they lack certain non essential features. The main limitation of the Express editions is that you can't use third party plugins with them. Third party plugins are used to enhance Visual Studio itself and are not to be confused with third party libraries which you can download conventionally or with the built in package manager Nuget. The Express editions are distributed by task so you only download what you need. If you don't want to create Windows Phone apps, for example, you don't have to download that functionality. To develop web apps you have to download Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-for-web http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-st... It allows you to develop ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms apps with C# or VB.NET right out of the box but you can also use it to develop web services with WebAPI, regular HTML5 websites, etc. And out of the box you can deploy by using FTP, WebDeploy and Azure but you can also use whatever external tool that you like. The product includes a copy of MS SQL Express that runs as a process but you're not limited to using Microsoft databases.
        chc 13y ago
        > It is fairly normal for companies that produce commercial products to offer different editions of their products at different price points. Microsoft is not a weird exception. Oh, no, you're definitely right about that. What I meant was weird was that nobody seemed to describe it in those terms, so I was looking for the wrong thing. Thanks for the rundown! Now that I actually have some idea what I'm doing, I'll have to give it another go once I get a bit of free time.
- edwinnathaniel 13y ago
  ... that's because you never dealt with their sales (or shielded). Wait until your operation gets bigger and requires monitoring and all the goodies specifically for IIS/Windows Server.
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    I have. I was a customer of theirs for (first SME and then enterprise) for over 10 years. And then I worked for Microsoft for 5 years.
polskibus 13y ago
Well, the article is written from a web app perspective, in which there is a big scaling tax when you go MS (windows server and sql server licenses). I know there's bizspark but it doesn't cover growth hacking startups well(limited prod SQL Server use, 3yrs only).
ed_blackburn 13y ago
Agree. Discounting C# on prejudice against Microsoft "reeks". Ignoring the Bizspark programme, the Microsoft development ecosystem is now so large you can actually avoid Microsoft licences. Look at the success of Xamarin moreover their tools that can be used to create systems in Mono in F#, C# et al hosted on Linux with Nancy behind Nginx using Postgres. The OSS ecosystem is growing too look at Edge.js for a good example of some innovation where C# and F# can strengths can be utilised in conjunction with other ecosystems with more focus on web. It may not be perceived as trendy but there's plenty of developers familiar with that ecosystem. If you're in London for example finding decent C# devs is not a tall order.
- chc 13y ago
  Doesn't using Mono bypass most of the advantages that people love when using the Microsoft ecosystem?
  - edwinnathaniel 13y ago
    Ding ding ding ding. People either not aware or pretend not to aware or have their biases set already when it comes to Mono. I'm not sure if people aware that the commercial entity behind Mono is focusing on Mobile heavily than enterprise and I'm not sure if these people are aware of the repercussion of that.
    - ed_blackburn 13y ago
      I think Xamarin are quite clear that their focus is entirely on their mobile offering. A side effect to Xamarin's success and investment is the tooling. The whole ecosystem is benefiting from the cross platform focus driven almost entirely by Xamarin's drive to own cross platform mobile development. Many OSS developers are releasing PCL and mono compatible versions of their software for this very reason. My comments are to highlight comments made by others too; that language and platform familiarity weigh very heavily in the decision process and that discounting the entire Microsoft ecosystem based on licencing is not a cut-and-try process as it perhaps once was. The ecosystem is diversifying and growing. It may not be as mature, advance, diverse as other platforms but for those already familiar with the technology it is a viable option.
danielweber 13y ago
Last time I dealt with Windows development (for the desktop) as a small shop, I was completely unable to understand the licensing. It ended up occupying a significant part of my attention. I'm sure someone will just "lol, use your MSDN (or whatever it is now) subscription", and when you have that and it's being paid for that's fine, and the tools are nice. But it's way too much for small shops to bother with, IMO.

hackula1 13y ago

I left the .Net world about 3 years ago. There were plenty of things to complain about, but licensing was never one of them. Most of the stack is free until you get to the point where you should be able to pay for it anyway.

chc 13y ago
I recently decided it might be worthwhile to learn the Microsoft stack, and had heard similar things about how you can just get whatever you need for free until you've scaled up. So I went poking around Microsoft's site for this free stuff. Half an hour later I gave up without having gotten my hands on anything but an impenetrable white paper about different versions of Visual Studio. So it seems that either people are exaggerating how free this stuff is or Microsoft is very good at hiding this.
- adolfojp 13y ago
  1. Go to the Visual Studio website: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/ http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/ 2. Click on the Products menu 3. Click on Express 2012 products 4. There is no step 4
  - chc 13y ago
    Ah, I didn't realize that when people say they give their stuff for free, they meant they're giving a different product away for free. That is…weird. I can't figure out what this includes. Is this actually enough to deploy a web app with the full Microsoft stack?
    - jaredsohn 13y ago
      > they meant they're giving a different product away for free To get the other software free, you need to sign up for BizSpark (which requires jumping through a few hoops). http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ The express apps should be sufficient for building apps (I'm using them for a desktop app right now) and should allow you to learn the Microsoft stack with minimal effort.
    - adolfojp 13y ago
      It is fairly normal for companies that produce commercial products to offer different editions of their products at different price points. Microsoft is not a weird exception. The Express products are completely functional although they lack certain non essential features. The main limitation of the Express editions is that you can't use third party plugins with them. Third party plugins are used to enhance Visual Studio itself and are not to be confused with third party libraries which you can download conventionally or with the built in package manager Nuget. The Express editions are distributed by task so you only download what you need. If you don't want to create Windows Phone apps, for example, you don't have to download that functionality. To develop web apps you have to download Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-for-web http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-st... It allows you to develop ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms apps with C# or VB.NET right out of the box but you can also use it to develop web services with WebAPI, regular HTML5 websites, etc. And out of the box you can deploy by using FTP, WebDeploy and Azure but you can also use whatever external tool that you like. The product includes a copy of MS SQL Express that runs as a process but you're not limited to using Microsoft databases.
      - chc 13y ago
        > It is fairly normal for companies that produce commercial products to offer different editions of their products at different price points. Microsoft is not a weird exception. Oh, no, you're definitely right about that. What I meant was weird was that nobody seemed to describe it in those terms, so I was looking for the wrong thing. Thanks for the rundown! Now that I actually have some idea what I'm doing, I'll have to give it another go once I get a bit of free time.
edwinnathaniel 13y ago
... that's because you never dealt with their sales (or shielded). Wait until your operation gets bigger and requires monitoring and all the goodies specifically for IIS/Windows Server.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  I have. I was a customer of theirs for (first SME and then enterprise) for over 10 years. And then I worked for Microsoft for 5 years.

polskibus 13y ago

Well, the article is written from a web app perspective, in which there is a big scaling tax when you go MS (windows server and sql server licenses). I know there's bizspark but it doesn't cover growth hacking startups well(limited prod SQL Server use, 3yrs only).

ed_blackburn 13y ago

Agree. Discounting C# on prejudice against Microsoft "reeks". Ignoring the Bizspark programme, the Microsoft development ecosystem is now so large you can actually avoid Microsoft licences. Look at the success of Xamarin moreover their tools that can be used to create systems in Mono in F#, C# et al hosted on Linux with Nancy behind Nginx using Postgres. The OSS ecosystem is growing too look at Edge.js for a good example of some innovation where C# and F# can strengths can be utilised in conjunction with other ecosystems with more focus on web. It may not be perceived as trendy but there's plenty of developers familiar with that ecosystem. If you're in London for example finding decent C# devs is not a tall order.

chc 13y ago
Doesn't using Mono bypass most of the advantages that people love when using the Microsoft ecosystem?
- edwinnathaniel 13y ago
  Ding ding ding ding. People either not aware or pretend not to aware or have their biases set already when it comes to Mono. I'm not sure if people aware that the commercial entity behind Mono is focusing on Mobile heavily than enterprise and I'm not sure if these people are aware of the repercussion of that.
  - ed_blackburn 13y ago
    I think Xamarin are quite clear that their focus is entirely on their mobile offering. A side effect to Xamarin's success and investment is the tooling. The whole ecosystem is benefiting from the cross platform focus driven almost entirely by Xamarin's drive to own cross platform mobile development. Many OSS developers are releasing PCL and mono compatible versions of their software for this very reason. My comments are to highlight comments made by others too; that language and platform familiarity weigh very heavily in the decision process and that discounting the entire Microsoft ecosystem based on licencing is not a cut-and-try process as it perhaps once was. The ecosystem is diversifying and growing. It may not be as mature, advance, diverse as other platforms but for those already familiar with the technology it is a viable option.

danielweber 13y ago

Last time I dealt with Windows development (for the desktop) as a small shop, I was completely unable to understand the licensing. It ended up occupying a significant part of my attention. I'm sure someone will just "lol, use your MSDN (or whatever it is now) subscription", and when you have that and it's being paid for that's fine, and the tools are nice. But it's way too much for small shops to bother with, IMO.