Brian Leach wrote: >Of course the relative costs of PHP (free) against Visual >Studio .Net or Borland C# Builder (both bl**dy expensive) >might just be a small factor :-)
Respectfully Brian, I seriously disagree and we owe it to ourselves to get up to date on the cost of development software. A personal developer version of C#Builder is Free. A company with a need for the extended versions wil hopefully make a couple hundred dollars during the year to pay for their development software. An Enterprise level shop doesn't care that the software costs over US1000 and probably wouldn't be using PHP for development. The Borland model is bl**dy expensive. For Visual Studio .NET I acquired a legal copy of an MSDN Universal subscription for US1300, the included freebies brought that down to a net of less than $1000. I think that's a very reasonable price to get access to every bit of software I need from MS, including support. Without shopping around someone will pay over $2000, but even that isn't outrageous considering the benefits. Remember, that's a Universal subscription, and there are other packages for a much lower cost. Just for reference, I've really tried to hate MS as much as it's popular to do so, but MS Support is absolutely fantastic, friendly, helpful, and fast. These days my concerns with Microsoft are with cross-platform compatibility and security. The idea that MS software is expensive went out the window a long time ago. >Even though AFAIK the C# compiler itself is still available free. Yes it is, and C# 2.0 is coming out which has a number of nice new features. Also, because C# is an open spec I believe it will be getting more respect as a cross-platform development tool (ala Mono, etc). This is not the case with VB.NET or other .NET/CLR-compliant languages, so any .NET code I write is in C#. You don't need an IDE to use C# any more than you need an IDE for PHP, but if you want one there are free and for-fee versions of IDEs for both. If you want the helpful tools you pay the price to the people who save you time. Tony Technical editor, C#Builder Kick Start, SAMS Publishing Buy it at Amazon or at your local book store! :) Post your C# questions to http://csharp-station.com/ -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
