Older MS software with developer licenses? - windows

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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Future of Windows Script Host

What is the future of Windows Script Host ?
Microsoft has announced, in may 2015, the end of VBscript and ActiveX in their new browser Windows Edge (and that's a good news for web standards, by the way). However, I can't find out recent information about the desktop part of the scripting world. I'd like to know if VBscript, wscript.exe, cscript.exe and mshta.exe will still be supported by the next Windows desktop versions. I'm worried because Windows Script Host reference is, days after days, more and more difficult to find in MSDN library.
I've a lot of vbscript and hta files to maintain (in a professional environment) and I need to anticipate if a migration will soon be required.
If you have any information about that, please share !
It is on sustained maintenance so no updates (unless a major security flaw is found).
Millions of businesses use so it is safe for admin purposes. Well over half of all programmers are basic programmers.
Yes, this question still stays relevant nowadays. I also can't find any official announcement from Microsoft. They ended up with IE and AHT support years ago, but WSH stays usable. So, the answer is: there's no official end date for it, but Microsoft stimulates programmers to choose Powershell over VBScript for new applications.
Having tons of professional VBScript code running and with Powershell's leaking for easy Windows deploying and maintenance in mind, my piece of advice for you is: stuck with VBScript until you can develop a custom flawless deploying architecture for Powershell. Then, start every new project with the last, but keep the support for the former until its app's end cycle comes.
Since the above-mentioned exe files are part of both the already released Windows 11 and Windows 12 in the test state, it can be rightly assumed that sooner or later Microsoft will further develop both VBScript and the closely related HTA. Last year I read in a Microsoft blog post about Windows that the company is already working on enabling VBScript to be able to use .NET classes directly, and on updating mshta.exe, that in Windows 12 the new version can be released.
Since I myself do VBScript-HTA developments, I was also concerned about how long the company would support this. But after reading this blog post, which unfortunately I can't find now, I am no longer concerned with switching to other systems.
The fact that Microsoft has further plans for the VBScript-HTA pair is perhaps also indicated by the fact that one of the example programs of the new Visual Studio, VS 2022, which has just been released, demonstrates how to integrate a new language into the VS environment through VBScript. And also trough it is demostrated how to develop a new project template.

analytics tool on windows server

There are several tools that help to analyze the users behavior on your website. I would tend to divide them into ones that live on an own platform and which can be accessed through and API (like Google Analytics) and that ones that are to be installed on your own server (like Piwik).
I will launch a new web project soon, which requires such a tool and thus I wonder which one I should use. In my case I need to collect the data on my own server, so I will have to stick with the second type of tools. After playing around a little bit on my beta server I considered Piwik to be pretty nice to personalize, but until now, I had issues to set up piwik on the production server, because it is a windows server and the piwik version that is available at the webapp installer platform of windows server requires a different php version.
Installing Piwik on another - let's say - analytics server, is not an option for me, because I don't want to create all this https traffic, just because I am not able to set it up on my production server. And I also don't want to purchase another https certificate ;-).
I browsed the Windows Webapp Installer Platform in hope of something that just works out of the box in Windows. Similar questions like this also propose Google Analytics or Piwik. But this cannot be it, can it?
So..
Is there a tool which all you Windows Server people use?
Are there other tools that are used frequently?
Or even: Is it somehow possible to set up Piwik on a Windows Server without using The windows Web App Installer? I posted a related question here that focusses on the installation of piwik.
Logparser is a free tool from Microsoft that lets you throw direct SQL queries to the IIS Logs generated on your Web server. You may use it to query basic stats such as:
[1] From what ip-address range I get the maximum queries? (users' country-profile)
[2] What particular pages (aspx/html) are most frequently visited?
[3] At what time of the day, do I get the maximum requests?
I remember using this tool in one of my earlier projects, but the reason was to track down some performance issues. Also, the tool itself is console based, so you need to be familiar with command-line. However, a GUI front-end could be easily developed in a high-level language such as C#, I think there should be already some, that are free to download

Corporate apps for Windows Phone 7?

Apple has a corporate developer program with an elevated licensing cost, does Microsoft provide such a service for Windows Phone 7 developers?
This was asked at a recent MS event. You can assign (I think 5) phones to developer unlock them, then load application directly/bypass the marketplace.
Also, there were talks that they are hoping to soon allow beta/redemption codes to allow limited deployment of your application to non-unlocked phones, bypassing testing/marketplace acceptance.... But I do not know the status of this.
The best thing you can do at the moment is develop your application as normal and have a password/login screen at startup. This is a horrible approach, but it does work.
At the moment, the phone is very much targeted towards consumers.
I'm not sure what is provided in the Apple Enterprise version, but so far Microsoft only has the one registration process and no private app distribution: you can distribute apps on the market to everyone, or by giving your xap file to people with dev-unlocked phones, nothing in between.
The official line is NO, not yet.
Windows Phone 7 was created, first and foremost, for consumers, not enterprise customers.
That being said, LOTS of people are asking for this and Microsoft have said they will address this in the future. No timescales or details have yet been announced yet.
This will likely be related to the way that beta testing and home brew distribution are implemented. (Just my assumption.)
I don't know why I can't just comment on another answer in this thread, so my apologies for placing these remarks in an answer.
I think MS needs to really make this happen since it could be the saving grace for WP7. While I personally feel that my experience with WP7 and my Samsung Focus have been just as good or better than that with the second-gen iPod Touch that I have, there are a lot of people who aren't convinced. For better or worse, it really is the ecosystem that matters and MS has that within the corporate world.

Can no longer locate service packs for Visual Basic 5

I have been using Visual Basic 5 since it was first released until a couple of years ago.
I re-installed it on each new laptop I bought and downloaded the service pack each time. I think it is SP2 for VB5 I need.
But having not touched it in two years I have now just installed it on a laptop to modify an app. However, it seems that Microsoft no longer offers the service pack for download.
And on opening my projects i get repeated messages for each frame telling me I "don't have the license to use the control in developer mode".
What is this error and how do I get the service packs?
If you port to VB6, you shouldn't have to make very many changes.
If you port to any version of VB.Net, you will find that the changes are rather extreme. An automated tool will try to do some of the work for you, but depending on how your code was written and what VB5 features you used, you will probably find that you manually need to fix up most of the changes that were made.
The biggest problem is that some of the VB5 features don't have direct equivalents in VB.Net. Do any of your forms use control arrays? You CAN do something at least vaguely similar in VB.Net, but the conversion tool doesn't know about that, so converting them will have to be completely manual.
FYI, Microsoft service packs are available in two forms. The normal update process figures out what patches are needed on your computer, then downloads them and installs them. But there's also an "administrative" version that downloads every change that MIGHT be needed, in one package. That package doesn't automatically install - when the download is complete, you have to manually start it running. The admin version is intended for system administrators, who might have to apply the same patch to dozens / hundreds / thousands of computers on a network - you shouldn't have to download the same data over and over.
The admin service packs won't help you with VB5, of course (unless you find someone that downloaded the VB5 service packs and held on to them). But if you end up going to a new version of Visual Studio (or VB), and you think that it's likely that you'll keep using them more than 6 months or so past the end of Microsoft support, you might want to get in the habit of downloading the admin service packs and archiving them somewhere. It might prevent problems like this in the future.
The licensing issue is referenced on Microsoft knowledge base
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/181854
A fix is available, downloadable from the same place.
Note : if you are running Windows Seven, you need to run VisualBasic in elevated mode.

Is there a developer licensing program for OSX? [closed]

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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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