Microsoft Web-related News

There were a couple of big announcements from Microsoft this week, both of interest to web developers and/or users of the MS web stack. Without further ado…

WebsiteSpark (info PDF)

If you’re a small firm (less than 10 folks) focused on Web dev and design, you may qualify for a boatload of “free” MS licenses. In return, you agree to release a new site within 6 months and pay $100 when you exit the program (max 3 years).

The goodies:

Design:
- Visual Studio® 2008 Professional Edition 3 user licenses
- Expression® Studio 2 (or 3) 1 user license, available only to the Primary Contact for the Web Pro
- Expression® Web 2 (or 3) 2 user licenses
- Windows Web Server® 2008 (or Windows Web Server 2008 R2 when available) 3 user licenses
- SQL Server® 2008 Web 3 user licenses
Production and Deployment. If self-hosting, each Web Pro firm will be entitled to four processor production licenses each (requires enrollment in SPLA Essentials):
- Windows Web Server® 2008 (or Windows Web Server 2008 R2, when available)
- SQL Server® 2008 Web

You also get a couple support incidents, some free training and some potential exposure opportunities. What a sweet deal if you know you’re going to be building on the Microsoft stack.

Web Deployment Tool 1.0

From the site:

The Web Deployment Tool simplifies the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites. Administrators can use command-line scripting with the Web Deployment Tool to synchronize IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0 servers or to migrate an IIS 6.0 server to IIS 7.0. The Web Deployment Tool also enables administrators and delegated users to use IIS Manager to deploy ASP.NET and PHP applications to an IIS 7.0 server.

I need this. I look forward to trying this out. Did I mention I need this?

Man, I’m stoked.

The announcement post offers a lot of the details so I’ll just send you that way instead of doing more copying and pasting. I don’t have any insight to share on this yet, but I’m sure it will be the topic of a future article.

If anyone has used it I’d love to hear your comments.

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