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Microsoft Sets Tolls for .Net Developers
matsh writes: "Today Microsoft revealed the cost of signing up as a developer to .Net. Entry level is $1,000. Standard level $10,000. Custom support will cost even more."
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Interesting. What they are doing then is creating a bar to smaller (perhaps hobbyist) developers.
That just means that less cool stuff will be produced then I suppose.
Sounds like a fair game to me...
.NET is strong enough to warrant this -- and if you think it's rubbish, then they're only shooting themself in the foot!
.NET because then every second web site out there would be Passport authenticated etc... Hell, raise the price to $500,000!!!!!
They obviously think
Seriously though -- in a way it's better than giving it away with copies of Visual Studio
... in the war to drive out small-scale developers in favor of well-controlled large corporate entities. People paying that much money for the privilege of developing software are very likely to be quite aggressive in convincing themselves that they're happy. And note that much of the fees here will come from big fat IT budgets for internal application development. CIOs just want an empire like anybody else, and this sort of thing really fuels the fires.
The story mentioned online banking two or three times. I will NEVER use the same password for bank accounts that i would use for hotmail, much less the same authentication service.
Converging things like that is bad, mkay?
--buddy
I suppose that's one way of dealing with the industry downturn in the hope of keeping your shareholders happy. It'll be interesting to see how well it fares in real life of course...
GPL: Free to download, free to upgrade, free to use next year, but you may need to pay for support.
MS: Pay to have delivered, pay to upgrade, pay to use next year, and you will have to pay for support.
Well, my cash-strapped industry-downturn budget's made up it's mind...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
They did. The lesson was to give it away until the competitors selling theirs went away. When they go away, charge as much as you like.
Alot. MS was built on piracy: DOS, Win 3.1, Win95, Visual [anything], etc. All heavily pirated. How many programmers traded compilers among each other in high school and college? Most, I'm sure. I know I got my pascal, Quickbasic, and several C++ compilers from friends. I also gave copies to other friends. I only bought 1 version of dos, never bought windows until 95. Why do people pirate? Look at the price of software. What'll happen if .NET stuff has workable copy protection? It'll flop. Free (pirated or otherwise) or very cheap is REQUIRED to start a new "standard". You need young geeks to work with it, grow with it, learn it, etc.
With the failings of the dotcom model, someone needs to start using the web for just more than a bunch of websites offering resources and to put this emmence network to some practical use.
Where does this assumption come from that if big companies aren't making money off of it, the net is not being of practical use? I just don't get it. Yes, I can see why companies would want to find a way to make the web useful for business. What I don't get is why all of us as a whole world population should think that this is necessary for the web to be useful. I send lots of E-mail; I find scientific preprints online; I can easily post information that people across the world can see; I download huge quantities of free software to run personal and professonal workstations; I order some books and computer hardware online. All of these things are of tremedous use to me, but by and large only the infrastructure providers are profiting off of it. Why should we think that the web isn't of any use right now just because, as one self-styled luminary noted, it isn't obeying some basic rules of business?
Mind you, if companies do find ways to make money off if it, I don't begrudge that... IF (1) I'm not forced into using it (and with M$ behind passport, I bet it will get very difficult for me to do the sort of online commerce I've done in the pass without giving into it, which will piss me off), and if (2) the great elements about the open web which is a "collection of websites" right now don't go away (and the entertainment industry very much wants them to go away in order to turn the internet into the next TV so that they can more easily make money off of it). I'm not anti-business, but I really would like the internet and the web to keep some of the great features it has right now.
-Rob
Microsoft says customers who sign up for .Net My Services, expected to debut in full next year, can expect to eventually get one-step access to electronic documents, contact lists and calendars; instant alerts on stock changes, weather forecasts and flight delays; and automated transactions, such as online banking, ticket purchases and stock trades, from Microsoft and its partners.
... My Yahoo! comes to mind. Why does M$ think they can get me to pay for this?
I get all of these things for free from various places around the net. In a lot of cases, there are even places that will give me one stop shopping
Oh, yeah, I use a Mac and Linux. I couldn't pay for them if I wanted to.
Here comes the Sun
:)
Doo doo doo doo
Here Comes the Sun
And I say......
It's the most primitive load of junk I've seen in a long time for £80,000.
We bought a Sun E450 (against my wishes - the decision was taken before I got there so it was too late for serious debate). It had 4 SparcII 500Mhz cpus (this is about a year ago), 280Gb disk and 2Gb ram. It cost 80 thousand UKP. It came with:-
Solaris 8
No compiler.
No development tools such as make, M4, autoconf..
No decent desktop (do they really think anyone can be bothered with that joke desktop they supply, with no drag n drop, no file associations etc etc)
The hardware was out of the Arc - no RAID, no mirroring.
At the time I got a quote from Dell for an equivalent power machine - it came in at about £12,000 - with quad channel RAID controller, and 4 PIII Xeon 733Mhz cpus.
Sun charged us over 4000 a peice for the 18Gb Western Dig disks alone - each! When I quizzed them on this - they replied that they get the "best ones". My arse! My room full of Dell servers has WD disks and not one of them has failed - ever (2 years old now). But then even if one did - the servers are all RAID 5 so it won't bring the system down!
Same deal with the RAM - same stuff you can by on the open market - 10 times the price.
When you buy kit from Dell or Compaq (and probably everyone else too) the racks come with nice rack specific monitors, a proper rack keyboard that has a trackball, and fold away neatly. Except if you by a Sun server for 10 times the price - the damm keyboard was too wide to even fit through the rack door - no special monitor, and none of the doors shut properly.
"What a shoddy pile of old rubbish" was my first and lasting impression of "what Sun can give you for £80,000"
We got shot of it last month. Replaced by one Dell 6450 with RedHat Enterprise.
Sorry - this is completely off-topic - but I felt the need
That wasn't coherent. I hope some parts were slightly informative.
.Net services, not the development environment. You can write applications with visual studio .Net that don't use the services (primarily distributed authentication). You're getting the two confused. You don't even have to use VS .Net since you can download the CLR and compiler for free. Blame Microsoft for creating the blurry line between their own services and their development environment-- there really is a distinction though.
Not really, because the article refers to MS's
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
This is actually a much more complex problem: ".net" is a buzzword use for everything and it's opposit on today's MS products: from "application framework" to productr denomination to general startegie to actual technology to services.
It's actually becomming a real problem in the developpement because so many people are confused by this that they think that only "VS.net" can create web service applications and that only ".net server" can be used as a server plateform.
If you have your own server with the .net runtime, you don't need to pay this fee, since you don't use the My Services service. If you want to store your service at their site, or/and you want to use their services, thus build f.e. a shell around the functionality they provide, you have to pay for the usage of these services, like you have to pay for the cable TV services you get.
.NET runtime and VS.net. So stop crying this fee is for building .net applications.
Alternatively, other companies will be providing the same services for perhaps less or free. All you really need is a
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Scotty beam me up!
.Net is.
.Net services. You know... the idea of web services? Like this is what it'll cost if you want to utilize Microsoft's services as part of your system.
.Net programming environment, which from everything I have seen thus far indicated will be available free as in beer. Except for a number of value add pieces, such as the IDE, ASP.Net caching, and a performance tuned compiler.
Once again it becomes blazingly obvious that the bulk of Microsoft's detractors haven't a clue which end they use to go to the bathroom, much less what
This is about
Has nothing to do with the
It's not for the costs of the tools (ala msdn).
.Net services -don't- include CA. (which would be a shameful oversight)
.Net services from MS?
It's for the costs of access to their prebuilt -services-. If you have the skill to write and support your own shopping cart, you don't shell out $1000.
I mean, the price bar was set by Verisign. They'll charge you $1400 a year for a certificate and 'payment services' (cybercash).
If you snub Verisign and hit up Thawte ($125) for your certificate, and MS for your 'payment services' ($1000) it looks like you're -saving- $375 to me. And that's if MS
Is everyone so terrified of writing their own web calendar that they feel 'robbed' by 'having' to buy
But I suppose writing a well-thought article/post that points out that MS is -saving- you money (albeit a slight bit), or even just releasing their services at the already established going rate, just doesn't get the hits.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
...Not to mention that you could easily, legally, and without harassment buy a used guitar from pawn shops, consignment stores, garage sales, eBay, etc. for a fraction of the price of a new one. I doubt it would be that easy to get you're hands on a used
And more importantly, if you spend $1000 on a guitar, find you really don't want it, you can probably sell it again for nearly what you paid for it (assuming you weren't ripped off in the first place, it's still in good condition, etc)-- the only way you'll ever get your money out of your .NET investment is to sell software. Good luck, what with Microsoft including anything they can into the OS.
I do not have a signature
How about "If I can't read it with a non-MS editor then it sucks?"
First of all, any IDE that generates a mountain of horsesh8t and then sends your cursor to the "insert your code here" point is IMHO garbage. One thing I like about Java (compared to, say, MS Visual anything) is the way that the "generated code" is hidden in superclasses. MS sticks it in your face. (Well, Sun does it too in Forte for Java, but that's why nobody uses it.)
Collapsible code regions sounds like a bad idea, like the "design time objects" that MS encourages you to use in Visual Studio. With those, you're basically editing gibberish that's being presented to you as text (with "cool looking" COM-based GUIs embedded within the text). But whooo, you don't have to scroll over that collapsed code now! I've had to migrate an app away from ASP where the code monkeys used design time objects and I believe their sole purpose is to make porting away from NT impossible. Any ASP that was inflicted with these warts had to be completely rewritten from scratch.
In any case, an IDE with cool right-clicks in it seems like a really poor reason to introduce vendor lock-in with such a nasty vendor. How easy is it to maintain these thin clients? Can they be migrated to other platforms or are you essentially editing closed-format object code (being viewed as source) with that IDE? When choosing a technology on which to base a project, you should look at the longer-term strategy, like ease of maintenance, adherence to standards, etc. MS is hoping they can offer you an IDE with some flashy toys in it and fool you into going down their one-way street.
Maybe I'd try it out anyway, but it would mean installing IIS, which I would like to avoid. Which is pointless, because it's probably running on half the computers in the office without anyone knowing anyway. How about "right-click discover patches for latest security holes"? Now THAT would be useful.