Distributing VSPackage: is there something to pay to Microsoft? - visual-studio

Seems like one has to get an Id and register as Partner and for such pay a fee each year ?!
From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb458038(v=VS.90).aspx
When you are ready to distribute your
VSPackage, you can obtain a PLK for it
by visiting the VSIP Members Web site.
You must have a Windows Live ID to log
on. After you log on, follow the
instructions to obtain a PLK. For more
information, see How to: Obtain a PLK
for a VSPackage.
When you go there:
http://www.mstoolspartners.com/anonymous/VSIP.aspx
Need help choosing the right
membership level?
Technology Partner Membership
This level focuses on technical
enablement for companies who desire
development assistance with Visual
Studio. Annual fee: $2,000/year
(three-year contract)
Preview the Microsoft Development
Tools Technology Partner contract
Alliance Membership
This level provides technical
enablement as well as a base business
and marketing relationship with
Microsoft. Annual fee: $3,000/year
(three-year contract)

In recent years (i.e. since about 2003), you do not need to pay anything to Microsoft to ship a Visual Studio extension. The information you're looking at is outdated.
Today, the 'paid' VSIP program is only really for companies and groups that want additional marketing and technical benefits for supporting their Visual Studio extension.
To get a VSPackage to load properly in VS2002 - 2008, you do need a Package Load Key (PLK), but it's now just a matter of filling out a simple publicly accessible web form to get one (no payment or login required): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/cc655795

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Dynamics 365 Team license alternative

Recently Microsoft announced some changes to their Dynamics 365 Teams license. The people who have these licenses will not be able to access Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, custom model driven apps etc and will have their own app like Sales Team member app.
These dedicated apps have restrictions of only 15 custom entities.
This change will cause some of our clients a lot of problems. As per my understanding, the only option they will have is to buy the full Dynamics license.
Am I correct on above? If no then feel free to correct me. If yes then can anyone suggest a good alternative?
Yes, the new licensing model is quite confusing.
I suggest to check the updated licensing guide (if not already done)
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=866544
(if the link does not work, it is taken from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave1/dynamics365-sales/license-enforcement-users-new-team-member-licenses)
Allthough this document is quite extensive, it is also recommended to talk with you MS Sales Rep (or anyone else who is responsible for you from MS side) to make sure all your needs are covered.

How can I use different user accounts for different versions of Visual Studio at the same time?

I have 2 different versions of Visual Studio. VS 2017 which I use for work stuff and the new VS 2019 Preview which I am using for fun stuff, I would like to log in with my work user account into VS 2017 and my personal user account in VS 2019 preview. Every time I change the user account in one version, the other automatically switches to the new user as well. This has implications on things like VS settings that are used at work versus those I prefer.
Is there a way to isolate these logins?
Glossary and preface:
MSA = Microsoft Account, formerly known as Microsoft Passport, Microsoft Live ID, etc.
OA = Organizational Account, e.g. an Office 365 "employee" account.
An OA is not necessarily an MSA and different OAs and MSAs can even share the same sign-in e-mail address.
Microsoft is doing something about this mess, but it's still a mess.
e.g. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Azure-Active-Directory-Identity/Cleaning-up-the-AzureAD-and-Microsoft-account-overlap/ba-p/245105
On to your problem:
Visual Studio lets you use multiple accounts (MSA and OAs) for accessing resources (Azure, etc) and for licensing, but it only uses a single account (which must be an MSA, not an OA) for personalization. This is by design.
Here's a screenshot of my Visual Studio 2017 Account settings page. (Note: I activated my install using a Product Key instead of using an account):
You said you have two accounts: a work account and a personal account. Presumably these are both MSAs as you say you're also able to use it for personalization. I think you should avoid using your work account as the Personalization Account entirely and only use your personal MSA for that (assuming you want those single settings to be applied to both your home and work VS installs). You would still have your work account listed in the "All accounts" list, of course.
One of the ideas behind having single MSAs that are associated only with you and not your employer or other company is that employers and orgs would use Azure AD to let you authenticate with your personal MSA to access company resources. This didn't turn-out well in practice and it doesn't seem right that companies would add delegated authentication using peoples' personal (and often unprofessional) email addresses (imagine logging-in to your work desktop computer using x360xnoscopexlol#gmail.com while wearing a suit and tie).
You can still use a personal MSA to personalize Visual Studio, as if any of the OA accounts are associated with a Visual Studio purchase or MSDN subscription then VS will consider itself licensed.
All that aside, you have several options:
Don't use any Personalization Account and keep your settings in-sync by manually using the Tools > Import/Export Settings feature. This gives you the most control and lets you have per-machine settings.
Use a single personal MSA for all VS installs. This is the scenario I described in the previous paragraphs. It's what I use and recommend. You'll only run into issues if you have an unenlightened IT department or boss that forbids the use of "personal" accounts for anything company-related.
Use multiple personalization accounts and manually switch between them. (This is the "grin-and-bear-it" option. You could use a password manager and program like Autohotkeys to automate the process of switching between accounts though).

content management system for non-profit

I need to create a website for a non-profit that will need the following functionality along with the basic page editing and creation (hopefully a free solution)
- Newsletter
- Event Listing + integration with Google Calendar
- Possibly integration with system like guestlistapp to collect payments for Event Tickets
- Membership management system + collect payments
- Paypal Donations
I have looked at Umbraco but doesn't seem to have any of these plugins. Please suggest other systems that you may have used in the past and can be a good fit for this scenario.
Umbraco doesn't come out-of-the box with those plugins, but there are 'packages' available for some of those things, and with some custom code it could do all of those things -
For example, here is a newsletter addin:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/newsletter
A membership addin:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/membership-system
A paypal addin:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/paypal-ipn
An events calendar:
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/pdcalendar
Bottomline however is that with all of these packages, its not just a simple install and give to the client, they may require customization on your part so perhaps your client would be better-off with an off-the-shelf non-profit management package if that is what you are looking for.
Would recommend Joomla 2.5.6 for this.
JomSocial have a package that comes with a paid membership system which costs $268. As well as the membership system, I assume you are aware that JomSocial is a very big extension and wtih the right add-ons, will be able to perform many tasks. Take a look here:
http://www.jomsocial.com/package/
A free solution for paid membership could be Akeeba Subscriptions which is a very flexible component and integrated with lots of other extensions.
For donations, take a look at the category on JED here:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce/donations
For events and news letters, I would probably recommend using JEvents and
JNews which are both free.
As for a Google Calendar, check out GCalendar, which is also free.
Hope this helps.
I would suggest that you look at the "open source cms market share report", which is published every November and is very useful in determining which CMSs are dominant, which are growing and which are fading. For example Joomla is a dominant player, Umbraco is a growing player.
open source cms market share report 2011
The 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report concludes that three
brands - Joomla!, WordPress, and Drupal - dominate today’s market. The
Report concludes that WordPress leads in brand strength and market
share after a strong year.
The Report follows the market share and brand strength indicators for
20 top systems, assessing each on a wide variety of measures. The
study focuses on identifying the market leaders, both in terms of rate
of adoption and mindshare.
While WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal lead the survey set across a wide
range of measures, the report also identifies other trends in this
year's open source CMS market.
** DotNetNuke continues to lead the .NET CMS race, though Umbraco shows strength.
** Liferay & Alfresco are neck and neck in the Java CMS race.
** Concrete5 turns in an exceptional year.
open source cms market share report 2010

price of developer license for Windows Phone 7?

Does Microsoft offer developer license for professionals and students? Is there a special student program?
If you're simply interested in developing using the emulator, there is no license fee to pay. Just download the tools and go to town.
Scott Guthrie actually has a good write-up of all the tools you'll need to download (for free) and how to get started:
Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released - ScottGu's Blog
Registering for the Marketplace to sell your apps is another story. You will have to pay a $99 fee to create your account there unless you are a student participating in Microsoft's DreamSpark program (in which case the registration is free there as well).
To develop applications, it's free.
But if you need to know the price to submit your apps to the marketplace:
Check out Windows Development App Hub
It's $99 US Dollers or £65 in the UK.
That allows you to submit 5 applications. It is $19.99 for each app after that. If you are a student, you get a load of tools free. You can access the student membership via the link above.
the registration prices are here ($99) - http://create.msdn.com/en-US/home/membership
there is a great blog post about how to get from concept to marketplace here - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikeormond/archive/2010/11/15/windows-phone-7-apps-getting-from-concept-to-customer.aspx

What is the best pattern/solution to implement 'workflow (a process) for product development'?

Present:
The product development is done in Visual Studio at the moment using .Net technologies, so it's important to stay in the same set of tools. Roles apart from developers are using spreadsheets, docs and diagramming tools, photoshop to do their work.
Future:
We want to build a workflow (a sequential process with roles, queues for action items, passing on info from one role to the other, approval etc) for a product development. The software product will be in enhancement stage forever, more the reason to establish this flow.
Typical users are designers, business analysts, content creators, developers, code reviewers, testers.
Let's say a new webpage needs to be developed. It will be,
thought about by the analyst in the
tool, will enter the information in
some format
a designer will use drag and drop to
build the page look, pass it over to
the
content creator, who will add
content(help text, hyperlinks, pure
text etc) to the page
a developer will check his queue to start
building logic around this page and
make it functional.
I am thinking about Visual Studio Isolated shell to be used as a tool framework mainly due to it's IDE capabilities et al, to build this. Has anyone worked on a similar set of requirements? Any patterns/solutions/ideas around how to go about this in the VS Shell paradigm?
Update: Visual Studio Team System is already being used by the developers and testers, but there is no customized workflow for them (& analysts, designers etc) available in TFS. Also Visual Studio is not the place for non-dev users that want to do things like, - define navigation flow, design the page elements etc.
Sounds exactly like Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.
I think there is a market for this product as I could not find anything close. There are disparate tools and products but no unified IDE like experience available and needs to be built on our own.
VS Isolated Shell 2010 is the starting point and platform on which this can be built. Needs several man months and may be years. However TFS ALM application lifecycle management has several overlaps of features with this idea, although not all, because it doesn't provide a customized experience per your custom workflow.
Jury is out, needs figuring out.

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