Announced on the MSDN Forums:

Visual Studio Express is free for one year

Until November 7, 2006, we are promotionally discounting the downloadable versions of Express to free. This doesn’t mean that the product turns off after a year, but rather that as long as you download the product before November 7, 2006, you can get it for free and you can use it forever.

Rewards for Registering

The other big news announced at the Visual Studio launch is the availability of the Visual Studio Express DIY Kit, which is a set of benefits you get for registering Express and includes:

• 250 royalty-free stock photography images from Corbis
• Free Windows Icons from IconBuffet
• Free eBooks including: Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition: Build a Web Site Now, Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!, and Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
• 3rd party components from VSIP partners

via Metafilter

If you’re looking for a way to create tutorials and presentations of your software then check out Wink, from DebugMode. Wink allows you to capture screenshots along with mouse movements and you can also add your own explanations. There are several output options including a Flash movie which would be perfect for showing an active demo of your software on your website. Wink is free for personal and business use.

submitted via Brendan Flaherty

If you’ve been interested in testing out Ruby on Rails then head over to RailsPlayground.com and sign up for your free account. The service includes 20MB disk space, 500MB bandwidth, 1 free MySQL database and 1 free PostgreSQL database and no ads on your free site.

via DownloadSquad

09/21/2005 - Update from the RailsPlayground blog:

Since we have had such an overwhelming response we have decied to stop taking new accounts for now. We hope to offer free accounts again in the near future.

They now have sandbox accounts for $12 per year.

Jeff Sandquist points out that Microsoft has now released the Shareware Starter Kit. The starter kit uses the .Net Framework 2.0 and downloads are available for C#, VB, and C++.

From Dan Fernandez:

The Shareware Starter Kit is a sample application of the common features in all shareware applications. You can easily modify, extend and integrate these into your own applications. The Channel9 guys even have a contest where you can write code to use the Shareware Starter Kit and code your way to a free ticket to the PDC.

A lot has been said recently about Microsoft moving into SMB market but by releasing things like the Shareware Starter Kit shows me that they are committed to developers and partners even more than before.

REAL Software is providing REALBasic 5.5 for Windows Standard Edition completely free of charge in response to Microsoft’s discontinuation of Visual Basic 6.0 support. The offer is good until March 31, 2005.

Martin Weber feels that microISV’s are not on the radar of development tools companies. He looks primarily at Microsoft’s soon to be released Visual Studio Team System and writes the following:

While enterprise editions are often targeted at (larger) teams of developers they strip off too many features of professional editions to be suitable for a MicroISV.

I agree with that statement if what you’re looking for is an all inclusive solution, but there are plenty of companies out there that provide the microISV with free or inexpensive solutions that are fully integrated into Visual Studio. Eric Sink’s company, SourceGear, is a perfect example with his Vault source control product (free for one user) and Dragnet bug tracking software (ballpark price of $99/$129).

Microsoft is definitely not overlooking the microISV either. Jeff Sandquist recently hired an evangelist who will be working with the microISV community. We should be seeing more microISV related information coming out of Redmond in the near future.

Microsoft has announced the pricing and a simplification of the MSDN subscription services for the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2005. Promotional pricing is being offered for developers who wish to purchase an MSDN Universal subscription today which will allow customers to upgrade to VS 2o05 once its released.

It has also been reported that the release date of VS 2005 Beta 2 has been pushed back until April but the product release is still expected in September at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference.

Mark Miller discusses source code metrics to discover which parts of your application are too complex and could benefit from refactoring. He provides explanations of several issues that are somewhat controversial when gathering metrics on source code, such as the value of comments within the code. In addition to the explanations, Mark lists the values that can be applied to the different code parts used to generate the score and a table to decipher the meaning of the results.

via Alex Lowe

Recently I’ve been using Gmail as a code repository for a lot of the small code snippets I create and I’ve found it to be very helpful since the mailbox is searchable. No more opening all of the little text files I used to have spread out across my computer. You can even take it one step further and use Gmail’s Labels and the ability to star conversations to be able to find things very easily.

If you’re in need of a Gmail account, I have quite a few invites available. Just shoot me an email and I’ll send you one.

Nick Bradbury gives us an inside look on how he develops TopStyle and FeedDemon.

Adam Stiles follows up Nick’s post with an inside look at the NetCaptor development process.

37signals, the creators of Basecamp, have launched a new free online app called Ta-da Lists. The application is an excellent example of ’simple but powerful’ and would be a great tool for any microISV.

The original announcement for Ta-da was posted on their blog and immediately got a huge response. The comments are well worth a read and are a great example of raving fans.

Update: Jason Fried of 37signals posts that 2500 people signed up in the first 24 hours Ta-da Lists was available. The original post was the only announcement made.

Basecamp, a web-based project management solution by 37signals, is perfect for any microISV. The Free plan allows for one project with multiple users at no charge. It is also a great example for web based applications and usability.

Basecamp from 37signals