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Comment by ecaradec | Hacker News Reader

Capitalizing on you own strengh is a good idea. You don't want to spend month of research if you have a hour a day at most for working. Focusing on the production side is a better use of your time.

I didn't know bizspark. Can you get free licences to visual studio from it ? Do you need to be a real business to apply ?

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In answer to your questions: Yes. (You can get free licences to almost anything MSFT makes in software. The one proviso is that they'll charge you $100, total, when you exit Bizspark, which is the later of three years from now or when you start making $1 million a year in revenue. It is the sweetest deal you'll ever get for commercial software.)

There are four qualifications you have to make to be eligible for Bizspark. Being a "real business", by which I think you mean incorporated, is not a requirement. All you have to do is promise MS that you're actively developing software or related services which are intended to be core to your business. There are darn few people on HN for whom that doesn't apply.

I have never done development on the MS stack but if you do it is an absurdly good deal.

Aside from what patio11 has said, yes you can get Visual Studio through it.

I'm running Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and developing against SharePoint 2010 and Office Server 2007 as well as Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and the Office Web Apps 2010.

My total outlay so far has just been getting the company registered (accountancy fees) and then time on getting things like the bank account in place. I already had the domain and with the domain reflecting the business (even as a one-pager) I've made it through the rather simple BizSpark setup steps and now have full access to the MSDN subscription downloads.

If you touch anythign for Windows or MS products, BizSpark is a no-brainer. You just have to be a startup and have low revenue... which makes it perfect for the solo boot-strapper.

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