PDC05: Day Three (Bad News on VSTS Pricing)

All of the high energy I had built up over the last two days was almost completely extinguished when I found out that Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) pricing is still out of whack. To move from our present development environment to VSTS would increase our annual Microsoft tools budget at DeLorme by an order of magnitude. Though I can no longer find my link to it, I had thought I read a posting from blogs.microsoft.com that you could use Visual Studio 2005 Professional with Team Foundation Server. That would have added only about 20,000 to our budget, which is a case that can reasonably be made. I realize this technology was expensive for Microsoft to develop, but by having such a steep price it forces a number of ISVs to continue cobbling together a solution.

I spoke with people at the Tools & Languages track about the pricing situation. They were extremely helpful, but even the least expensive option, Team Foundation Server plus CALs for each developer, is still quite expensive. In doing research, I also discovered that with the change in licensing, moving to the new MSDN Premium call will still double our costs. It is probably time to start looking at alternative SCM systems again.

After all of this, I attended "Windows Server 'Longhorn': What's new for developers", but the focus was primarily on the security model and I was too bummed out to pay attention.