Appropriate MSDN Subscription

Question

I am looking for advice on the most appropriate MSDN license (without overpaying) for the following development team.

We are essentially a (3-5 developers) SharePoint/.Net development team that will be developing to SharePoint 2010. We also want to integrate with Team Foundation Server so any advice on the appropriate license for that product is also welcome.

My thinking is that we can benefit from VS Premium but hope to be able to get away with VS Professional. It seems that VS Ultimate is overkill and at $11,899 per seat is a nutty price.

All thoughts welcome!

Thanks

Answer 1

If you're a startup making less than $1 million per year I'd suggest you take a look at BizSpark. It essentially is MSDN free for three years and at the end you pay $100.

If you're a company making more than $1 million a year then you'll probably have to pay for one of the standard MSDN licenses. I think Ultimate is overkill in most cases as well. It is there because there are some companies that will buy ultimate no matter what the price is.

Answer 2

You'll get a TFS license that includes SQL Server Standard and 5 limited use (only can be used against one TFS server) CAL's with a VS Pro subscription or higher. In my opinion, Professional is a pretty good deal at $1200 a seat considering what you get.

Answer 3

You get a TFS license with each level of a MSDN subscription now.

Expression Studio is included with Premium and Ultimate, if that is useful to you. Same for production licenses of Office, Project, and Visio. If these are not important, or if you have other arrangements for them, perhaps MSDN w/ VS Professional would be best.

Premium seems to strike a good balance between the two extremes - most if not all of the useful tools, but at a lower cost than Ultimate.