RE: "Focusing on the price point aspect of free..."

Note that, that is why I specifically worded my posting as, "...these tools are 
all available for NO additional cost..."

and as far a SQL licensing goes...

MS SQL Express is free ($0) ... as are all the MS Express products... and if 
your app grows to need a large scale fee based products they are available. 
And the platform is so well supported that pretty much any database free or 
licensed is able to be used. This is why RedHat exsists, why Oracle brought 
MySQL, and Novell with SUSE and Mono.... etc, etc....

The cost of acquisition of software as a total cost of a project in the industry 
if fairly well known, and I would argue with UofM pricing, is egligable to the 
overall effort and cost.

The question being asked was about frameworks and so my response was 
focused on providing an option. 

Robustness, completeness, support and a health ecosystem are worth every 
penny (IMHO), but the integrated platform experience from front end to back 
is what pushes the value over the top for me. 

Team productivity will quickly recapture the investment that you make up 
front when starting with this setup. As will one major platform defect incident, 
being resolved by the vendor rather than your team. No matter how cool it is 
to get your name on a contrib to an open source project.

Don't get me wrong I love free software as much as the next bloke. But in 
some cases I preferer the commercial market and what it has to offer, even 
enough to recommend it to others! ;)
 
Here's to Rails, and PHP, and ASP.Net, all in all! It's a great time to be a 
developer! 

Cheers, 
Craig



On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 08:44:41 -0500, Aaron J. Zirbes <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>... be careful with your claims of freedom.  Richard Stallman would not agree.
>
>Focusing on the price point aspect of free...
>
>To serve up a public facing, database backed web page at the U of M, only 
$760 in licensing
>
>SQL Svr Web 2008R2 1Proc - $635.00
>Win Server Web 2008R2 - $30
>Visual Studio 2010 Pro - $0
>
>To serve up a public facing, database backed web page outside the U, just 
over $5,000
>SQL Svr Web 2008R2 1Proc - $3,500.00
>Win Server Web 2008R2 - $469
>Visual Studio 2010 Pro - $1,199
>
>
>This can be restrictive when you are working on applications that will be 
shared with 30+ other
>sites.  Most of which without Microsoft Site Licensing.
>
>--
>Aaron
>
>On 09/17/2010 04:52 PM, Craig Gjerdingen wrote:
>> I don't know if you're open to it, but I'm pretty partial to Microsoft .Net
>> framework and platform stack.
>>
>> Pretty much everything from the front end to the back end is totally
>> integrated. It is a wonderful developer/designer experience.
>>
>> Additionally, these tools are all available for NO additional cost to you as 
UMN
>> staff. But you have to ask for Visual Studio 2010 professional edition from
>> [log in to unmask] because they don't list it on
>> https://download.software.umn.edu/ any more (now it is in netfiles)
>>
>> In particular the combination of the powerful Visual Studio 2010 IDE, .Net
>> framework 4.0, Entity Framework or NHibernate, and ASP.Net MVC 2 are a
>> formidable offering. Again all of this has NO added cost to you. It's all free.
>>
>> There are a ton of IOC and ORM offerings in the .Net space so you can 
easily
>> choose one to your liking.
>>
>> MEF and Unity (dependency injector) are fairly cool too.
>>
>> Support, Training, Developer Communities, Books, knowledgeable 
consultants,
>> campus expertise, 3rd party vendors are all available.
>>
>> One configuration you might want to look at to get started (where someone
>> else has done the work of picking the pieces for you) would be to look at
>> http://SharpArchitecture.net/ which is stored on GitHub at
>> http://github.com/codai/Sharp-Architecture
>>
>> Before you choose Ruby/Rails I suggest you investigate deployment 
difficulties.
>>