Visual Studio now available in cloud subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio now available in cloud subscriptions

visualstudio.com

113 pointsmynameisvlad41 comments

For those of you indie developers that want Visual Studio (non-community edition) but don't want to pay for Visual Studio. MS run a program called BizSpark. You can get a few MSDN items (windows, office, VS, SQL Server, etc...) for free for 3 years.

https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

I've used it a few times very nice program!

You also get a $150 a month of Azure credits for 3 years so the value of the offer is massive if you make full use of it. Given the increased openness of MS products the risk of vendor lock-in, traditionally the criticism of Bizspark, is reduced. In 3 years time MS is likely going to be competing with all the other major players in running .Net code rather than operating in its own space.

Bizspark is great. But let me just give a generic reminder: Consider what you'll do after the three years if you get heavily invested.

If you are a Microsoft shop either way then it doesn't matter too much, but if you're making technological choices now, consider how well that will scale without free licenses (e.g. ASP.net/MVC, how much is Windows Serve licensing going to cost you? Visual Studio? Active Directory? MS SQL?).

This isn't an anti-Microsoft post, just a post to remind everyone to think about the future of your small business with technological choices. Bizspark is designed for you to get yourself into the Microsoft's way of doing things (which is good and bad, depending on your needs, etc).

I actually like Microsoft's stack, but realise it is expensive, too expensive for many small businesses.

It is also $150 a month of cloud time which will run lots of other stacks including Linux VMs if you want to run your own thing. If you want to write .Net but mitigate the Windows TCO risk write software that runs on .Net Core and is therefore cross platform, use an ORM like Entity Framework to abstract away the database. You don't get the benefits of the extra bells and whistles but these days you can write .Net that will quite happily not be tied into a MS server stack, let alone what the landscape will be in 3 years time.

If you're very small and have some clever devops guys you can use Visual Studio Community to develop and deploy to Mono. You _really_ have to know what you're doing with Mono though, it can be a headache, hopefully the .NET on Linux stuff will fix that up.

Check out the license, for non-"enterprise" (where enterprise is >250 PCs, or >$1M in revenue) users, up to 5 users in your company can use it.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/mt171547.aspx

Isn't the Partner Network another way to get dev. softwares at a reasonable price if you meet the requirements? I always thought it was kind of the suggested path: bizspark => ms partner, but I may be wrong.

https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/us/Pages/index.aspx

You have to be a basic Microsoft Partner to be part of Bizspark.

Some higher tiers of the partnership program receive free software. But initially you'll be at "Network member" which doesn't provide any free stuff.

Silver and Gold tiers receive:

- Free support (20 and 50 hrs respectively, 15 and 20 incidents)

- Internal use licenses: 25 and 50 on-site respectively.

- MSDN: 5 or 10 seats.

However to get to Silver or Gold you need:

- Customer references: 3 or 5 (silver or gold).

- Business-focused competency assessment: 1 or 2.

- Revenue commitment (i.e. buy a certain number of Microsoft licenses)

- Microsoft certified staff: 1 or 2 minimum (that must be active, so renewed every few years).

The Silver and Gold partnership tiers are pointless for large business/corporations, and unreachable for startups/small businesses. They're really for mid level businesses that are Microsoft focused.

Before jumping on Bizspark, I would recommend talking to companies that have used it such as Stackoverflow. Bottom line; you'll have fun not worrying about licensing for 3 years, but then you might be in for a shock.

As a positive anecdote, the startup I worked for used the Bizspark programme and got acquired before the 3 years were up, so we never had to worry about licensing or server software costs (as the acquirer was a much larger company)

Also, after the acquisition, it was probably one of the reasons why a full integration with the parent company other products wasn't considered (different tech stacks), so we integrated via APIs, which was the right decision (it would have taken too long otherwise, even on the same software stack)

On the other hand, I never want to have anything to do with RDP ever again.

You can do a surprising amount via powershell and wmi

Great program! Our company leveraged it years ago and we're still around :) Also be sure to check into BizSpark Plus!

I'm kinda surprised that MS continues to charge for visual studio. Not that it isn't worth it because it's an incredible IDE. But because it seems like Microsoft would have more to gain by having more developers using it vs the profit from developer licenses.

You get more for "free" now. Community Edition allows plugins (like Resharper) where as before it didn't.

The "better" versions only add bells and whistles - which entice people onto MSDN or similar.

Maybe you have it the wrong way round. My experience is limited but these Microsoft product's often make the back-end seem coincidental. If the developer only ever touches the rich GUI then that is the product that is actually valued. Making it completely free could devalue the product and allow non-Microsoft technologies to become dominant. People could seamlessly use Visual Studio to develop products that don't rely on MS products and barely even notice.

$539/yr (with MSDN subscription) or $45/mo (without) versus $499 for the standalone and $1199 for MSDN subscription

> $539/yr (with MSDN subscription) or $45/mo (without)

So, MSDN has a net cost of -$1?

Yes. You only get the MSDN benefits on annual subscriptions. Plus, the benefit comes with $50/mo in Azure credit, so it can pay for itself and then some.

I'm on the VS Pro with MSDN track and paying $799/year. I pay every year, and don't need a perpetual license. Is there any reason why I shouldn't switch to the cloud subscription for $539/year?

How nice of them to give me $1 off when paying yearly.

You also get "Subscriber benefits" if you get the annual subscription. No idea what they are though, the site is rather vague.

Here are the subscriber benefits: https://www.visualstudio.com/products/subscriber-benefits-vs

You get Full Subscriber Benefits (https://www.visualstudio.com/products/subscriber-benefits-vs) for paying yearly, you don't get any subscriber benefits if you pay monthly.

One such benefit is $50 per month of Azure credit for dev/test. That pays for the subscription right there.

You can also throw in the product licenses you get for all of their products as well. Last place I worked let me keep my VS Pro sub and I realized it gave me a TON of licenses with the sub:

http://imgur.com/uQxIeVA

I didn't found the page where to look at the pricing / buying a monthly subscription.

Currently we already consumed Bizspark so I'm looking forward for a Visual Studio 2015 monthly subscription.

If you're stuck on Windows/.NET this is good. But the bigger question is WTF are you doing developing on Windows (unless they're games). They're making good progress open sourcing, and at some point it will have enough community worthwhile open libraries, support multiple platforms, but it still is a bad decision.

> But the bigger question is WTF are you doing developing on Windows (unless they're games).

The market share of desktop users is, what, 94/4/2 between Windows, OS X and Linux? And there are use cases where native apps still beat web apps. So, shockingly, if you're developing apps for Windows users, you're developing... on Windows.

I assume he means on the server side. Most of us have the good luck to never need author a GUI, the hellhole of developer productivity that it is

You must be joking. Developing GUI apps is MUCH simpler than developing a backend with responsive HTML5/Javascript frontend.

> HTML5/Javascript

That's GUI development too

...why would you assume that? Are there enough server-side games that are Windows-specific for him to make that caveat if he meant server side development?

> > But the bigger question is WTF are you doing developing on Windows (unless they're games).

Are you saying the only software is games?

No. I'm saying almost the opposite, that there's a LOT of software that isn't games, and some of it is client-side and some of it is server-side, and since he's explicitly excluding one and only one kind of client-side development, the most reasonable assumption is it's because he means to include all the other kinds of client-side development.

> I assume he means on the server side.

Lots of enterprises are Windows shops. If you want to sell to those enterprises, you develop on Windows.

What does that have to do with it?

StackOverflow is a well known big-example of a full server-side Microsoft-stack.

The Eiffel Tower is exactly 300m tall.

What was your point?

Because Visual Studio is a very powerful IDE I like using. Because I like writing statically typed code for both the server and client (props to Typescript).

I grew up writing VBA and hating it. At university Java and Linux opened my eyes. But then I learned to be a professional developer on C# and ASP.Net MVC, and it is good.

Not only is VS the best IDE ever (and each version keeps getting better, with the new profilers / test runners, etc.) but the .NET vm is very powerful, and comes without a lot of the baggage of the JVM.

I feel there is a certain distaste of .NET and c# among programmers (especially in the startup world) but I honestly don't understand it.

I use and love dynamic languages like python, js, ruby... but when it comes to performance + happiness, or low level windows hacking[0], .NET is king.

[0] I've recently been using c# for code injection and hooking third party libraries.

Some of the performance drawbacks can be avoided by falling back to inline asm via FASM, since native code is easy to call from .NET and the productivity gains from being able to quickly prototype something are huge.

And if you love Python, Python Tools for Visual Studio is pretty friggin awesome --even if you are debugging python that is running on a Linux box.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/python-vs.aspx

https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS/releases/v2.2

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