licensing and other costs related to the use of .NET

[Guest]

Hi,
Not sure if this is the right group for the question:
I've just finished a course/certification where I've used Visual Studio and
want to work further on software development with C#,ADO,ASP hopefully the
end result being an application that can be sold. Before proceeding, I wanted
to better understand what licensing costs are involved in the .NET area.
I would welcome any corrections to my oversimplified view and any further
licensing/costs I need to consider:
- .NET is license free
- Visual Studio has associate license costs but free IDEs are around
- for ASP we have Web Matrix - free
- there are free SQL servers + MSDE for the SQL side of things

BR,Vjeko

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi vbportal,

Good questions regarding the licensing. I've never had to think about it
as I'm on volume licensing and only use the server side components.

I've just finished a course/certification where I've used Visual Studio and
want to work further on software development with C#,ADO,ASP hopefully the
end result being an application that can be sold.

And what will this application do exactly? It had better be something
pretty special, or no one will buy it..., and it will only run on
Microsoft systems that have the correct version of .NET framework
installed - unless you're going to redistribute it on CD or something?

If you allow it to rely on client installs of .NET, how will you cope
with 100,000's of users with messed up computers and misconfig'd
frameworks? You best test it quite carefully on a range of computers
with varied levels of security access.

- .NET is license free
- Visual Studio has associate license costs but free IDEs are around
....

- for ASP we have Web Matrix - free

This looks really nice! Bear in mind though that ASP.NET is a server
technology, so you're really talking about a glorified text-editor here?
If you're writing ASP.NET, how will you sell it, and how will they
install it? A deployment project perhaps? Again, you'll have to ensure
it's going to run "out of the box" on a huge range of messed-up servers
with "who knows what" security...

- there are free SQL servers + MSDE for the SQL side of things

You have to be careful here; MSDE is a dead duck, it's only for testing.
The other "free" SQL servers you speak of may not have OLE DB
interfaces, but even if they do, you'll find a gazillion caveats trying
to interop with Microsoft's .NET technology. Decent third party drivers
can cost more than the rest of the IDE tools put together, and how will
you know which database the customer is going to be running? Even if
they allow you to put MSDE on their machines (big mistake as it's a
nightmare to patch and about to become a versioning disaster) it will
only be useful for private data and won't interop with their "other"
production server. For private data, you're 100000 times better off with
XML.

What will you use for a UI? I'm currently using free Mozilla with
cross-browser W3C compliant DHTML and ECMA compliant Script.

 

[Guest]

Hi Gerry,
I'd class myself as a beginner, so I'm really interested in hearing
everyones advice and experiences ;-)

I am actually putting together some specs with a friend on a small project
for practice (we're both unfortunatelly out of a job and need the practice).
To make things realistic, the application, costs etc need to be
considered/realistic and we want to get as much out of the project as
possible to be prepared for future steps. To plan is to have an enterprise
architecture where we make use of several technologies/languages with local
SQL server/C# code and ASP/SQL web hosted.
The plan was to use .NET all the way.

I appreciate all your comments till now and would appreciate further
pointers on
other technologies you would suggest for reasons of
cost/licensing/distribution etc.


BR,Vjeko

 

[Etienne]

To build robust applications, .NET and MSDE is really the good way to go.
I'm developping using those. For MSDE, you can get information about MSDE
here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/SQL/MSDE/MSDE/default.aspx

The .NET Framework is free. Although Visual Studio.Net is way the best
editor available, there are some free editors around. And it is also
possible to run .NET applications on Linux using the MONO .Net Framework.
See www.go-mono.com for more info.

As far as I know, you can be allright just by buying Visual Studio .Net
Professional. Not sure about the price though, you can look on MS website.
MSDE will be allright unless you need it as a real server. The number of
connections is limited; it's perfect for local or small networks.

If you want decent report engine, decent grid, etc. you need to plan for 3rd
party components. If you don't want people to decompile your code, you can
also look for an obfuscator, since .NET compiled code is VERY easy to
decompile.

For Setup program, I suggess Inno Setup
(http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php). It's a free and very powerfull setup
engine.

Etienne

 

[Guest]

Currently, I have created an application via c# with MSDE. The questions I
have are if I need to buy any licensing/distribution for the application (exe
file) I've created, .Net Framework 1.1, and MSDE 2000 to be able to sell the
product. I have purchased a copy of Visual C# .Net 2003 standard.

I appreicate all your comments. Thanks.