Joe's Blog

Microsoft announced late last week a program to help small companies jump start (Spark) their web development efforts using Microsoft technologies.  The concept is to help web development companies of 10 personnel or less with free server products and tools along with  training, support and marketing efforts.  A company, once accepted into the program, receives free software tools Visual Studio Professional along with Expression Studio 2 or 3 (1 user) and Expression Web 2 or 3 (up to 2 users).  The server software includes Windows Web Server 2008 or R2 (when available) and SQL Server 2008 Web Edition for both developement and production.

 

In conjunction with the WebsiteSpark announcement, Microsoft also released Web Installer 2.0.  This web application allows the developer to install free web development tools onto their computes.  Upon launching the Web Installer you are given the opportunity to install the Express Editions of Web Developer and SQL Server 2008 up to date with SP1.  Not only are the Express Editions available through the installer, but it also sets up your local IIS with different extensions and includes things like Model Viewer Controller (MVC),  PHP drivers and Silverlight Tools projects.  Finally, there are a bunch of free web applications that can be used as templates for your projects, you can sort these by different criteria including most popular.  For example of what you can get, the first four applications I saw sorted by popularity where in the image below.  The image also gives you an idea of the Web Installer interface.

 

 

Be sure to check out these two new "Free" Microsoft offerings at http://microsoft.com/web.