I’m wondering what the cost is in tools to work with and deploy a website like stackoverflow with asp.net mvc.
I have just checked and it seems like visual studio professional has suddenly got a lot cheaper, infact almost too good to be true price.
But if they are working with SQL enterprise, the cost of this seems around £10,000 for the enterprise edition?
Or have things with 2008 changed dramatically, so that you can infact deploy something like the workgroup edition for a production environment, and take advantage of the 16GB of Ram that is spoken about on the podcast?
I’m asking this as I am about to start learning asp.net MVC, but I could just as easily put my energy into working with Java, and be less worried about working with a technology that is less likely to be found for forward thinking web apps due to the deployment costs.
You can develop an ASP.NET MVC site with very little out of pocket costs:
I can see your only overhead being the cost of hosting the site. Look for a hosting provider that has the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and SQL Server 2008.
Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to see what is available for free from the Microsoft to assist with developing web applications.
Also, if you developing software to sell commerically you can enroll in the Mircosoft BizSpark program. It is a program designed to encourge start up companies to use the Mircosoft development stack.
Update
Microsoft just recently announced the WebsiteSpark which is more geared towards start up web development shops that company that sell software.