WebsiteSpark is here at 24.9.09

this morning Scott Guthrie announced the new websiteSpark program.

It's a program designed for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others.  It enables you to get software, support and business resources from Microsoft at no cost for three years, and enables you to expand your business and build great web solutions using ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint and PHP, and the open source applications built on top of them.

So what's the catch?

surely MS isn't giving you this for free??? Well, that was my first thought anyway... turns out that they actually give you this for almost zero...  There is no obligation to continue to use any of the software after the three years is over, and there are no costs for the three years other than a $100 program fee at the end of the three years. If you want to continue using all the great stuff, you can do that at a charge of $999/year package, or you can only buy the productions server licenses for $199/year (web and database server).

The other good news is that you can upgrade the tooling, for example VS2008 to VS2010. And not to mention the free publicity you get!

Conclusion

I have to admit I was a bit sceptical in the beginning, but if you are a starting web development company or an individual developer (ie Freelance) this is a great cost inexpensive way to have a jump start

A must read if you wanna do unit testing at 23.9.09

I met Roy at the European TechEd 2007, great speaker, great writer too! After a tweet about stealing, I thought I'd post something about his book. This book is all you need to quickly get up and running with unit testing, I really like the chapter on making your team/company embrace unit testing.

Scott Gu's coming to the Netherlands at 11.9.09

Scott Guthrie is coming to the Netherlands to talk about ASP.Net 4.0, MVC, Visual Studio 2010 and more new stuff coming from Redmond. I just heard that I will be representing Fujitsu Services

TFS 2008 and linked classes at 10.9.09

At the company were I used to work we had a lot of shared classes (check this article for more info on shared classes) for all the apps we develop. When I started there in january I asked why they did not have any form of version control. They told me that this was because both vss and tfs could not handle the shared classes. At the time I did not have time to research this, but today I found a few extra minutes.

I made three projects, of which two in the same workspace, created a class in the first project and added the same class as link to the second project. When I added the class as link I got the following warning

.. Ok, now this seems to make sense.. I have both projects in the same workspace so it should not be neccesary to change the bindings..

So far so good... Let's try and change the class in the second project and check in the change from within the second project:

As you can see in the picture above, the path is to the first project...
Change is checked without any problem, let's see if it is really changed in project 1:

It is changed. Ok, so the argument of not having tfs because it cannot manage shared classes is not entirely valid. Let's see what happens when I try to add the class of project one to the third project:

Conclusion

So the shared classes should be preferably in the same solution. If this is not the case, you can still add the class as link to a different solution as long as it is in the same workspace!

Welcome at 4.9.09

Welcome to my blog, you've found it. Now I guess you wonder why you are here, well... check back later and you will find wonderfull posts about Silverlight, Biztalk, SOA, Saas, Sharepoint and so on... stay tuned for more....

Bastiaan