Saturday, May 30

Cool

Thanks, Microsoft!

No, really.

Microsoft have a program called BizSpark that offers free development tools and server software to small web startups.

I'm a small web startup.  I'm about as small a web startup as you can find.  And while I'm not sure I want to move away from Python, I could use IronPython and have access to all the other Visual Studio languages - so I could easily import modules written in C# or IronRuby or whatever.

And SQL Server 2008 has some attractive advantages over MySQL, and can be licensed quite cheaply for web applications.

But I wasn't going to spend a lot of time, effort, and money testing out the Microsoft platform when open source was working pretty well.  Microsoft knows this, so they set up BizSpark to remove one of those factors completely.

SoftLayer is now a BizSpark partner, which made it really easy for me to apply.  So I did.  And today my application was approved.

Now I just have about three metric tons of stuff to download.  They are very generous.  I currently have Visual Studio Express installed - it's the free edition, but it gives you access to a pretty decent set of tools for basic development.  Now I have access to so many different versions of their enterprise-level development tools that I don't know where to start.

Whether and how I use the software remains to be seen.  I do want to write a desktop client as a companion to Minx, so that seems to be the place to start.  But in any case, I have to thank Microsoft for giving me access to all this stuff.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:21 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 275 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Are you porting mee.nu now?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, May 30 2009 12:57 PM (+rSRq)

2 No, but I see why you asked.

I've given the server its monthly nudge (actually, it's only been three weeks).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:53 PM (PiXy!)

3 Testing testing...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:54 PM (PiXy!)

4 More of a kick than a nudge, but we're back now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:55 PM (PiXy!)

5 MySQL needed to be restarted.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:55 PM (PiXy!)

6 Just posting comments to convince myself that it's all fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:55 PM (PiXy!)

7 Seems to be.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:55 PM (PiXy!)

8 La la la...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, May 30 2009 01:56 PM (PiXy!)

9

Bug? On this post of mine, 5 comments seem to have vanished into the ether. I added a new one, and it shows up. The comment total says 6 even though that last one is the only one you can see.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, May 31 2009 05:22 AM (+rSRq)

10

There was a brief period of error 500, and now everything is back to normal. (Reboot?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, May 31 2009 05:29 AM (+rSRq)

11 Yeah, sorry about that.  I saw the comments go missing, and I figured that it had to be index corruption.  A scan confirmed this, so I ran a fix immediately, but that more-or-less locks out the application while it's running, hence the 500 errors.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 31 2009 05:38 AM (PiXy!)

12

thanks for the nice note on BizSpark, Glad you like it.

Julien

 

Posted by: Julien at Tuesday, June 02 2009 12:06 AM (8cP8s)

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