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Comment by virmundi | Hacker News Reader

The thing about adoption in start ups is that Visual Studio 2010 Pro is so expensive. If Microsoft really wants to stay relevant they have to release Pro for free. They have to compete on price with the Eclipse or VIM/command line world. Until then, they will slowly die off. (The express versions are a joke, don't even get me started).

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Microsoft runs a BizSpark program that, for all intents and purposes, gives startups access to most Microsoft software for free.

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

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You only pay for licenses over 4 OS and 2 SQL Server (or outright new ones) after graduating BizSpark. 2 SQL Servers (OS licenses are chump change by comparison) go a loooong way* too, as you're presumably scaling up rather than out.

http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/about/Graduation.aspx

Through the grapevine I hear the "review" process (for more free licenses at graduation) is extraordinarily accommodating, though I'd guess if you're spinning up a box per customer or something insane you'd get denied.

Lots of people get this wrong, I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't carved this correction into a mountain somewhere...

*Stack Exchange is running 2 + failover ( http://blog.serverfault.com/2011/09/30/the-stack-exchange-ar... ), and was running on 1 not too terribly long ago.

Did not realize it changed later. Thank you.

May i ask what's a joke about VS Express? IMO they are very much capable. At least for windows forms and web-applications, never tried the c++ version. In fact it beats any other IDE i've tried anyway.

Only thing i really miss from pro is plugins, version control-integration and code contracts, the last being a thing that probably justifies a price tag anyway.

You can't unit test with them out of the box. To get unit test integration is a rather large effort. If you want to carve a project into a web layer and into the business assembly, you have to jump between editors (web and C#). These two make the tools rather worthless for anything complex and web based.

Now their WinForms ability might be great, but there are few start ups out there at are actually doing anything with desktop development.

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