Is An MSDN Subscription the Right Choice For You?
MSDNSource has a simple mission - to help you decide whether or not you need an MSDN Subscription and if so, help you pick the right one. You might be surprised by this, but not every .net developer needs an MSDN Subscription. Some will be able to do just fine with Visual Studio Express, the free version from Microsoft, most will prefer Visual Studio Professional with its additional features and then a smaller group will want to add an MSDN Professional or Premium subscrption.
How do you know if should be adding the MSDN subscription? We've noticed over the years a couple of different situations where a company should strongly consider it -
Does your company or your clients require that you build applications on the newest round of Microsoft Technologies?
When you need to build applications using the applications and frameworks that the Microsoft developers are working on today and have them ready by the time Microsoft is ready to release them to the rest of the World, then you really should consider an MSDN subscription - as a subscriber, you will have earliest access to the beta and community technology preview editions of the .net framework, Visual Studio, and almost every other Microsoft product. Need to make sure your Visual Studio add-in will work with the next release or that you're ready to run your application against the next version of SQL Server on launch date, then the MSDN Subscription is the right tool for you.
Do you want to ensure professional quality support from Microsoft?
As an MSDN subscriber, you can submit professional grade technical support incidents which will be answered by Microsoft Developer Support Engineers 24/7. If you have an application that your selling to others or has to run in a mission critical environment, it can be a great comfort to know that you have priority access to get your problems solved quickly.
For less time sensitive support, you'll also have access to managed newsgroups. You can post your issues, and if not resolved by other members in the community, Microsoft guarantees that their support engineers will review and reply within 48 hours.
Do You Need to Test Your Applications against a Wide Variety of Microsoft Platforms and Technologies?
One of the first reasons someone may look at purchasing an MSDN Subscription is that they see they can purchase a copy of almost every product Microsoft produces for a fraction of the real cost. Yes, that's true, but the devil is in the license agreement. Why can you purchase at such a deep discount? Well, what you're buying is a development license, not a production license. What's the difference? Let's look at an example - you're building an accounting application for your company that will be built using the .Net framework, run on SQL Server 2005, and be installed on Windows XP SP 2 clients. You have a team of 4 developers and have an MSDN subscription - you install SQL Server 2005 and set up a server running Windows 2003 to be used by the development team. This is where the development license comes in and can be a real life saver.
Let's say that during development you decide to use SQL Server 2008 instead of 2005, you log into your MSDN Subscription account and download the most recent version of SQL Server 2008 and start your testing. Now you've built the application and are ready to deploy - at that point you need to purchase a production version of SQL Server 2008, Windows 2003 to install on the server, and any accounting work station will need to have the Windows XP SP 2 client purchased and installed. So legally, you can't run these production apps on your MSDN Subscription software.
The real reason Microsoft "gives" you all the software as part of the MSDN Subscription is to allow you to easily test your applications against the widest possible array of Microsoft products - they let you set up an inexpensive development sandbox. If you had to purchase a production license of SQL Server 2008 or the latest version of Windows Vista OS every time something new is released, developing for the Microsoft platform would be a very expensive proposition. With the MSDN Subscription, the next time you decide your application should support the Korean version of Windows XP Professional, you just need to download the bits and not have to spend the time or money to track it down.
The Bottom Line
If you're situation falls into one of these categories, you should really consider adding the subscription option. If you just aren't sure, then please contact us - that's what we're here for. An MSDN Subscription can make your application development process much more cost effective and keep you on the leading edge of Microsoft technologies.
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