What are some affordable developer resources?

Question

Hi Guys (and gals), In the past my employers bought me subscriptions to MSDN and Safari but now that I am working as a contractor and have to pay for these things myself, I was wondering if there are other services that offer subscriptions or access to technical books. I develop on Windows using C++ and .NET.

Answer 1

Affordable coding resources? Try out Stack Overflow! It's got more information than many books, and it's updated in real time! < /reputation-whoring > :-p

Answer 2

Visual Studio Express Edition is a great option for development without buying an MSDN subscription.

Answer 3

All of the MSDN documentation is online and free.

There are more blog than I can count, and some great link blogs (for .NET I like The Morning Brew and Jason Haley).

Of course, StackOverflow is always a good place to go :)

Answer 4

While an MSDN subscription is a nice convenience, most development you'll be doing as an individual can be accomplished with the Express Editions of the various Visual Studio languages. This is especially true for C++, since many of the support tools included with the full Visual Studio release these days are more targeted at .NET development.

I don't know that there's a good replacement for Safari out there, though. My employer won't pay for it, but I consider the fee to be money well spent. It's saved me many hours of aggravation and searching, and offers a constant flow of new interesting material for broadening my knowledge base. If you look at it compared to the cost of buying books (or the opportunity cost of waiting for local libraries to get them, by which time they're often outdated), it's money well spent in my opinion.

Answer 5

You could use Eclipse for C++, it provides similar functionality to Visual Studio.

I think that you may like

A step-by-step guide to moving Microsoft VS projects to Eclipse C/C++ Development Toolkit. 

Answer 6

Microsoft are actually extremely helpful towards individual developers.

1. Get a Microsoft Action Pack (MAPS) subscription. This costs (in the UK) £199 a year and gives you virtually everything you'll want apart from Visual Studio. Highlights include several copies of Windows (1 install of 7 Ultimate and I think 6 of Business atm), SQL Server 2008, Exchange and several installs of Office Professional. Pretty much a no-brainer.

2. Obtaining Visual Studio is slight less more tricky, but Microsoft usually have programs such as Empower where they'll sell Visual Studio and an MSN subscription at a highly discounted rate in exchange for some commitment to produce a product with it. I've seen variations offering the web tools for free for a similar deal and various other items. Joining the Microsoft partner program is generally your route into these.

All in all it's difficult to fault them - unlike Borland/Inprise/DevCo/Embarcado/Whoever who have nothing similar available for my favourite native windows development system Delphi, indeed quite the opposite.

Honorary mention must also be made of Sharp Develop which I've used for the odd small IronPython project, is free, and might suite any .Net needs you have.