What is the cost of coding and deploying asp.net MVC or stackoverflow.com, ASP.NET MVC VS struts,spring

Question

I'm wondering what the cost is in tools to work with and deploy a website like stackoverflow with asp.net mvc.

I have just checked and it seems like visual studio professional has suddenly got a lot cheaper, infact almost too good to be true price.

But if they are working with SQL enterprise, the cost of this seems around £10,000 for the enterprise edition?

Or have things with 2008 changed dramatically, so that you can infact deploy something like the workgroup edition for a production environment, and take advantage of the 16GB of Ram that is spoken about on the podcast?

I'm asking this as I am about to start learning asp.net MVC, but I could just as easily put my energy into working with Java, and be less worried about working with a technology that is less likely to be found for forward thinking web apps due to the deployment costs.

Answer 1

Costing is a bit tricky when it comes to tools, it is always depends on what you purchase and whether you can find deals discounts. on the other hand, for development cost if you are a hobbier dev, it is almost ZERO cost, with Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express edition + SQL Server Express edition both are completely free to download and develop stuff on, when it comes to commercial software it becomes as mentioned above a bit trickier.

Answer 2

You can develop an ASP.NET MVC site with very little out of pocket costs:

• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (Free to download)
• SQL Server Express 2008 with Service Pack 1 (Free to download)
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP 1 (Free to Download)

I can see your only overhead being the cost of hosting the site. Look for a hosting provider that has the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and SQL Server 2008.

Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to see what is available for free from the Microsoft to assist with developing web applications.

Also, if you developing software to sell commerically you can enroll in the Mircosoft BizSpark program. It is a program designed to encourge start up companies to use the Mircosoft development stack.

Update

Microsoft just recently announced the WebsiteSpark which is more geared towards start up web development shops that company that sell software.

Answer 3

For "hobbiest" grade work there's a free version of the toolchain out there for pretty much any toolchain.

For "professional" grade stuff, obviously stuff starts to get a lot more expensive. I'd posit, though, that in a situation where you were building a system from scratch on your own (buying and running your own servers, etc) the costs more or less level out after a while.

Personally, I think the biggest cost is on the human knowledge front - that is, finding people who really know how to use the system.

So, I'd say that ASP MVC and Java are equally cheap, assuming you have a programming staff that knows how to use it. (Or, more to the point, equally expensive if you don't.)

If you're starting from scratch with no existing "knowledge base"? I don't think it matters. Really. Sure, hindsight is always 20-20 and in five years we'll all realize what we should have been shipping in today, but for the moment I'm not sure that cost is a useful metric for decision making.

In other words, go with whichever one sounds cooler. I mean, at least you'll be interested in rather than resentful of the technology. (Trust me, that goes a long way.)

Answer 4

If there's no specific functionality needed in SQL Server, you could equally go with PostgreSql.