Azure and its companion products look compelling. Unfortunately, I'm a cheap dude who doesn't want to spend a penny to try new shiny toys. That, and the marketing stuff in Azure website is a little bit confusing to me at first.
If Azure is free in the future, and if your book is still relevant in terms of code/API and stuff, I'll buy it first.
Azure has a local simulation environment that ships with the SDK - you could try that out if you want to play with it. On the cloud, programs like Bizspark get you there at lower cost.
If you have a MSDN subscription, you get a ton of free hours/storage every month - you can run decent sized websites off that
If you have a business you can sign up for Microsoft's Bizspark program (bizspark.com) and you can get access to Azure for free (not to mention all of MS's other development tools for free as well).
I have heard about BizSpark program offering by Microsoft, that would only be available for a maximum of 3 years if I'm not mistaken? And you have to be a startup (e.g. have a business or whatnot) right? Not just a regular person/user registering to a website and have instant access to all these goodies.
Yes it's available until your business has been around for 3 years or has >$1mm in revenue. You are supposed to be a business although verifying that is done more or less in good faith. You are required to have a URL and an email at that URL. You don't have to be using the MS stack though.
If I remember correctly, there are program directors, you contact one and ask them to sponsor you. They do whatever they feel they need to to verify that you're a business (our sponsor just looked at our website which had some simple info on what we were working on) and then they give you a key that you use to sign up. More info, including the sponsor we used, can be found here : http://www.47hats.com/2008/11/47hats-is-now-a-microsoft-bizs...
Nice, I hadn't heard about this yet and I'm in a start-up with just 3 people total that just formed. So yeah, this is looking like it will work for us. Hopefully vs2010 is a free download, that would save us a nice chunk of our limited startup dollars. Thanks for posting this.
If Azure is free in the future, and if your book is still relevant in terms of code/API and stuff, I'll buy it first.
I wish you the best sir.