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Microsoft offers a bunch of incentives for developers (like MSDN) and startups (like BizSpark) to get them to develop software for the Microsoft platform with less investment. MSDN for example allows me to test my software on every version of Windows in existence without buying a full license to that version. BizSpark is even better, giving all the software essentially for free, as long as it's used for the startup's business purposes.
Does Apple offer something similar?
P.S. So far the only legal way of testing our software on OSX that I found is to buy a Mac Mini, which costs almost as much as MSDN and doesn't come with a tenth of the benefits (as far as software development is concerned).
The closest thing I know of is the Mac Developer Program which gives you access to various resources but specific to your question you gives you access to software currently in development for compatibility testing etc as well as other compatibility testing tools. You still need a mac to make use of many of the benefits but if you are a member you do get a hardware discount. I'm not aware of any service that is as extensive as MSDN and as the features mentioned are only available to ADC Select or ADC Premier accounts. I can't give you exact details of everything an overview can be found at http://developer.apple.com/products/mac/program/
You can access many resources with a free ADC account though non of the features anywhere near what you are talking about are in the free account.
Edit: I forgot to add that there is a "compatibility labs" feature that allows you to test your software against different setups and os version etc. It says on the site:
"The Compatibility Labs feature a wide range of Macintosh configurations, allowing you to test on a multitude of Apple technologies with various versions of Mac OS X software, including Intel-based or PowerPC Macs, Xserve, iPhone, iPod and much more."
With Microsoft, you can get their "Visual Studio Pro With MSDN Pro" subscription, which is currently about $800 a year. That provides operating system installs (which you have to unlock online, ten at a time), technical documentation, and the Visual Studio development system. I think you might get a few developer tech support incidents with that.
With Apple, you can join the ADC Online program for free; that gives you complete technical documentation and the XCode development system. Then you can buy Snow Leopard for $29 and do unlimited installs because there's no key - or if you buy a new Mac, you get it for free. You can don't get any developer tech support incidents, but you can join a boatload of free Apple-sponsored email lists, online developer forums, and so on which their internal engineers are pretty active.
In both cases, you still need hardware. For Mac development, that's $600 for a Mac Mini which includes the development system and unlimited OS installs. For Windows development, that's $800 for the OS installs and development system, plus whatever else you spend on hardware.
I pay the $800 a year for the MSDN/Visual Studio subscription. I also pay $499 a year for an Apple Select membership, which provides extra goodies like a discount on Apple hardware, beta versions of the OS, and developer tech support incidents.
MSDN was a pretty good deal a number of years ago, when they bundled Office with it. Now that it's mostly Visual Studio plus Windows installs, not so good. These days, I think Apple's offerings provide much more value for the money - especially the free ones - but YMMV.
OS X ships with all of the dev tools on the install disk. An ADC select membership ($500) is cheaper than Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription, as far as I can tell.
I don't know of any BizSpark-like program on the Apple side.
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Suppose I have a freshly compiled and tested 100 MB software. I want to eventually distribute it and sell it online as a product. This is a cross-platform product (done in C++).
What are the needed technical steps to achieve this? For each step, a description and an example of some software (if pertinent) would help. Also, how important is it would be helpful too.
My problem is that it is not really clear what are the stages to go through to release a software online. This list would help me a lot to know what steps I should investigate in priority.
What I am not talking about / interested in (because it is mainly the results I got while searching for this):
Website building;
Marketing & Sales;
Continuous Integration servers;
Steam, Mac Store, Windows Store;
Open Source.
Steps I identified:
Obfuscate: not sure about this one;
Licensing System: activation code system integrated in the software directly (See Digital River, SafeNet, Reprise, Flexera);
Installers: MSI for Windows (see Wix), DMG for mac;
Code Signing: ensures that your users do not get warnings (Verisign, GlobalSign...)
Free Trial Distribution: putting the installers on our own site is risky because of bandwidth and lags. Your users should be able to download a free trial quickly wherever they are. So a CDN would help (AWS CloudFront).
Auto Update System: notifiy the users, download and install new versions (Omaha);
Activation: this allows the user to activate the product online or directly from within the product;
I think that these two steps are the missing pieces in your list:
Write documentation (in your case PDF/RTF/HTML, or online tutorial)
Integrate a payment provider that will accept the payment on behalf of you
With the above two steps you should be ready to go.
There are some books that I can recommend you (they are 10 year old now, but you see shareware/try before you buy/ software is an old thing - nowadays people tend to write web apps or mobile mostly):
http://www.alibris.com/From-Program-to-Product-Turning-Your-Code-Into-a-Saleable-Product-Rocky-Smolin/book/10572213?matches=50
http://www.alibris.com/Micro-Isv-From-Vision-to-Reality-Bob-Walsh/book/9122742?matches=37
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We are looking into solution which involves playing copyright protected video using Microsoft DRM Server and Silverlight player. the video will be played to registered users on the web using Silverlight player.
I've read all MSDN documentation on this subject and kind of get an idea how it is supposed to work.
However, I couldn't find information on pricing and installation of Microsoft Inidividuazation server. Hence, here are my questions for someone with experience in this area:
How fast is it to setup a quick "proof of concept" solution involving windows DRM and Silverlight. Can we do it on our own or need Microsoft help?
What is the pricing for such solution in operations?
thanks!!
To answer your first question: Micorsoft Silverlight has built in support for Microsofts latest DRM technology: PlayReady DRM. To set up a proof of concept solution you will need a license server and a packaging server, both of these are availible through the PlayReady Server SDK which is built upon the .NET framework. Notice: it is an SDK, not an out-of-the box server, so some developing needs to be done. To set up a proof-of-concept solution you will need the SDK, which is accessible to you after a licensing progress that can take a few weeks. For the Silverlight DRM client, all you need is the silverlight development kit, availible free online. It's hard to say how much time that needs to go into developing the license server and packaging server since it depends on how much staff that is availible to the project and the skill of your staff, but creating licenses for the silverlight client is the easiest license to create. It should not be an overwhelming project to take on. You can set up this proof-of-concept solution your self, but you will need to involve microsoft to license the server sdk.
To answer you second question: The pricing for the Server SDK is 30k $, with additional cost depending on number of processors in the license server or a small additional cost for each license that is released by the license server. So it depends on the size of your service and customer base. If you need to release a lot of licenses you will need at more powerful license server, plus release a lot of licenses.
I would also suggest looking into PlayReady service providers. These sell production-ready playready solutions to be used by other service providers that don't wish to implement a whole PlayReady solution by themselves. A list of available service providers is available from Microsoft's PlayReady homepage.
I hope this answers have been at least a little helpful, and I wish you all luck!
You can ask from Microsoft WMDRM 10.1. It is for SERVER 2003, and It's free !!!
I produce server software and have been fine with all Linux environments so far, both for production and as deployment target. However, I want to provide a broader choice of target environments in the future and I'm also planning features that would consume and produce Office documents.
As a first step, I am looking for a good way to get a number of MS software products (XP, Vista, Server 2003 & 2008, Office 2000, 2003 & 2007 ...) to put on some VMs in my testing setup, so I can start to play around.
So far, I get quite a good impression from what I read about MS's partner program (aka Action Pack). The only thing I'm missing from what the website tells me is older software versions. As I want to mimick possible customers' setups and there's always a lot of people that run older versions, that would be quite important for the testing scenario.
Eventually, I'm going to face similar questions with Apple OS X, so if anybody has some hints on that, I'd be glad, too.
I really think that you are looking for an MSDN subscription, with an MSDN subscription you get access to the older software and can use for development/testing.
I would read up on the details from the MSDN site. They list the OS versions and items you can get with each.
As a Microsoft Certified Partner you can access the MSDN Subscriber downloads. There you will find all (?) versions of windows back to 3.1 and most versions of office (back to office 95, but excluding Office 2000).
The licenses allow you to use the software for development, but not for production use, so you should be fine with it.
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I need to test my website on Windows, now and in the future. I don't yet have Windows. I just need the software, but don't mind purchasing hardware to get the software. What's the cheapest ethical way to do this?
Some options:
buy a used computer on eBay. Will I be able to upgrade to future versions of Windows if I also upgrade the hardware, including everything but the hard drive? I'm considering a $100 box on eBay with Windows XP Pro.
buy Windows XP Pro (about $140 on eBay), and pay for upgrades as time goes by.
use a screen capture service on the web. (These are either too expensive or don't offer enough control, in my experience).
UPDATE: I bought a sealed version of XP Pro from a reseller on Amazon.
VMWare Server is available for free, and is available for Linux. You'll still have to pay for Windows, but you won't need additional hardware.
Also, consider that in addition to XP, you may also want to test on Vista and Windows 7. Virtualization is a good way to go here.
Another free solution is VirtualBox, from Sun, which is able to install on Windows XP Home (which VMWare Server will NOT). Possibly not what you need given you are non-Windows, but in any case it's another option.
A home Windows licence only costs that much if you buy a shrink wrap copy. The version bundled with new PCs (OEM) is much cheaper - if you are willing to buy the hardware as you say, the cost of the Windows licence could be as little as $25 of the total cost.
For $299 you can get a good netbook; This one has 160GB of harddrive space, Windows XP Home, 1GB of memory, and is plenty fast for web browsing (I've also run SQL Server for testing on one upgraded to 2GB). If the resolution becomes an issue (1024x600), just plug in an external monitor. As a bonus, it's a tiny machine, so it doesn't take up lots of space like another desktop.
EEE 900HA XP
AS mentionned, you can get the Microsoft free VPC Image. Then you convert them to VMWare Images (the server version is free) with VMware vCenter Converter
Download Virtual PC: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b07c9ef0-265a-4237-ae3b-25bc8937d40f&displaylang=en
and use this:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7c2b5317-a40f-4e86-8835-d37170c5923e&displaylang=en
Edit: And if you don't have Windows, Virtual PC may work on Wine.
browsershots.org should work for basic needs, although it just shows how it looks, not any of the functionality.
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Closed 9 years ago.
Sorry for the Windows developers out there, this solution is for Macs only.
This set of applications accounts for: Usability Testing, Screen Capture (Video and Still), Version Control, Task Lists, Bug Tracking, a Developer IDE, a Web Server, A Blog, Shared Doc Editing on the Web, Team and individual Chat, Email, Databases and Continuous Integration. This does assume your team members provide their own machines, and one person has a spare old computer to be the Source Repository and Web Server. All for under $200 bucks.
Usability
Silverback
Licenses = 3 x $49.95
"Spontaneous, unobtrusive usability testing software for designers and developers."
Source Control Server and Clients (multiple options)
Subversion = Free
Subversion is an open source version control system.
Versions (Currently in Beta) = Free
Versions provides a pleasant work with Subversion on your Mac.
Diffly = Free
"Diffly is a tool for exploring Subversion working copies. It shows all files with changes and, clicking on a file, shows a highlighted view of the changes for that file. When you are ready to commit Diffly makes it easy to select the files you want to check-in and assemble a useful commit message."
Bug/Feature/Defect Tracking (multiple options)
Bugzilla = Free
Bugzilla is a "Defect Tracking System" or "Bug-Tracking System". Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors charge enormous licensing fees.
Trac = Free
Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects.
Database Server & Clients
MySQL = Free
CocoaMySQL = Free
Web Server
Apache = Free
Development and Build Tools
XCode = Free
CruiseControl = Free
CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.
Collaboration Tools
Writeboard = Free
Ta-da List = Free
Campfire Chat for 4 users = Free
WordPress = Free
"WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time."
Gmail = Free
"Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful."
Screen Capture (Video / Still)
Jing = Free
"The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere."
Lots of great responses:
TeamCity [Yo|||]
Skype [Eric DeLabar]
FogBugz [chakrit]
IChatAV and Screen Sharing (built-in to OS) [amrox]
Google Docs [amrox]
You've got most of it covered.
I always add space, time and money for 2 more things you might consider strange.
A machine set up just like the average user. No development or debugging tools installed. Make it look like someone just bought it from the Apple store. I do image switching but I've know people who swear by switching to an external boot drive.
Also include a 'free' lunch for a virgin. This is someone to come in and test your program that is NOT a developer and doesn't know squat about your software. You might have to do this more than once but don't ever use the same person again.
As an added note, make very sure the 'free' applications and web sites you use are truly free, not just free for personal use!
Good luck on your project!
Collaboration Tools
Skype = Free - If you can't work face-to-face a tool like Skype can get you pretty close for no cost assuming everybody already has broadband. The mac client works great and since most modern macs have a camera already you should be mostly set.
Consider hudson as a CI server
How do you do time tracking/scheduling/release planning?
Those that help you ship on time? ala FogBugz
Trac and Subversion have a pretty nice integration that lets you link Trac tickets to SVN change sets and vice-versa (SVN change sets can actually move a Trac ticket to a new state).
Some built-in Leopard tools that I find useful are iChat AV and Screen Sharing.
Also, Google Docs, especially spreadsheets and forms are nice (and free).
Change CruiseControl for JetBrains' TeamCity. It's free for up to 20 users, and is more powerful and usable than CruiseControl.
It's easy to set up, and has some amazing features. Such as automatically sending off a build to be performed on any spare computer you may have sitting around in the office.
Version control: svnX is a free GUI-based Subversion client.
RDBMS: PostgreSQL is a free relational database with a track record stretching back a couple of decades. It's easily installed on OS X.
IDE: If (and possibly only if) you're coding Java, Eclipse is an unbeatable (and free) IDE for Java (and other platforms, though I'm not vouching for anything other than it's Java ability).
Screencasting: ScreenFlow is outstanding at $US 99.