Sunday, January 27, 2008

Cheap development cost in .NET

I always hear that many people in Indonesia said that develop in .NET platform is expensive. That because you have to buy many tools from vendors, but some tools is not actually used in the production. Many companies spend on the very expensive tools, controls or library to accelerate development process.
The only software you have to buy is Windows, such as Windows XP, 2003 Server, Vista or 2008, depends on the project.

If you have enough budget, you can buy Visual Studio professional or the team edition. For starter software development company and doesn't have enough budget, you can easily use many free tools.

First thing to buy is a windows operating system. It is the heard of everything. You need this to make your computer live :). Choosing the right windows version for you is more important. Below is the suggested matrix that you can use as a reference.

Green box means the suggested operating system for the project.

Windows XP Home

Windows XP Prof

Windows Vista Home Basic

Windows Vista Home Premium

Windows Vista Business

Windows Vista Ultimate

Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2008

Windows Form with data

Windows Form tools

Windows Form client-server

Windows Form consuming web service

IIS must be installed

IIS must be installed

IIS must be installed

IIS must be installed

IIS must be installed

Windows Services application

Windows Form consuming remoting

Cannot use HTTP Channel

Cannot use HTTP Channel

Cannot use HTTP Channel

Windows Form component and controls

Windows Form using Direct X

Windows Presentation Foundation

table 1: Matrix for common Windows form or WPF project type

Windows XP Home

Windows XP Prof

Windows Vista Home Basic

Windows Vista Home Premium

Windows Vista Business

Windows Vista Ultimate

Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2008

Common Web Application

Web Application with AJAX

Web Services as producers

Web Application consuming web services

Web services as orchestrator

Web Application using Silverlight

Web Component and Controls

Web with design focus

WPF XBAP

table 2: Matrix for common Web Form project type

If you want to develop on .NET Framework 2.0, you can download the free IDE of Visual Studio 2005 Express edition in http://www.microsoft.com/express/2005/ , but I suggest you download the latest version of Visual Studio 2008 Express edition in http://www.microsoft.com/express/. In the Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition, you can easily switch the target from .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 in the projects.

The next step is getting the latest Windows SDK and .NET Framework. Until today, There is Windows SDK for Windows Vista has released. You can download on http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ff6467e6-5bba-4bf5-b562-9199be864d29&DisplayLang=en. For .NET Framework 3.5 runtime you can download on http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/0/f/60fc5854-3cb8-4892-b6db-bd4f42510f28/dotnetfx35.exe.

While developing a solutions, you need a documentation. You can download the offline version of MSDN on http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6ff3bc60-32c8-4c22-8591-a20bf8dff1a2&DisplayLang=en

Web deployment is not so easy since in the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, there is no web publishing function available. There are small command line tools from Microsoft to help web deployment. The aspnet_compiler.exe is the compiler that come from .NET Framework 2.0. You can find it in the directory: Windows --> Microsoft.NET --> Framework --> v2.0.50727. The other is web deployment project. You can download in the http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336619.aspx. This tools will help to publish web application and web site project using command line tools of aspnet_merge.exe

You can use MSBuild to automate build the project.

To make a setup or installation, you can use WIX.

The other free tools that can help:


kick it on DotNetKicks.com

0 comments: