It’s called WebSpark ! (http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/)
Here is the OFFICIAL Description.
WebsiteSpark is a new global program, designed by Microsoft to help small professional Web development and design service companies succeed, by providing new business opportunities through connections with global partners and customers, support and training, and software tools – at no upfront cost. WebsiteSpark provides professional Web development and design companies with an innovative vehicle to get access to:
Business Opportunities: Opportunities to expand their customer base and drive new business, by showcasing their capabilities and connecting with partners via the WebsiteSpark Marketplace and other Microsoft marketing and business networking vehicles.
Support and training: Professional support from Microsoft and connections with WebsiteSpark Network Partners, Hosting Partners, and other Web developers and designers with complementary technologies or business models—an entire ecosystem that can provide a wide range of technical and business resources for every Web professional need.
Software and solutions: Fast, easy, and immediate access to current full-featured Microsoft development tools and Web server production licenses at no upfront cost, to build, design and bring to market differentiated, innovative, and rich Internet sites.
Read ScottGu’s blog post about the program [ HERE ]
To all those Microsoft haters–Its time to "husu-up". Great opportunities especially to small independent developers. Go MS
Hi Haroun,
There are reasons why most successful website startups do not use Ms stuffs.
Non Ms sites: Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, Youtube, well pretty much all the cool sites you can think of …
Ms sites: Microsoft … … … ?
"There are reasons why most successful website startups do not use Ms stuffs."
There are reasons why people with agendas will pick several examples of successful non MS sites and not bother to list any successful MS based sites.
Examples of sites which do or have used .net
MySpace, Dell, Monster, NewEgg, London Stock Exchange, Lego
Millions of developers use .net, this scheme makes these tools very cost effective for small businesses struggling to get on in a tough economic climate, and yet people still use it as an excuse for baseless Microsoft bashing.
With a scheme like this people can learn .net and other language like Ruby and form a considered opinion on which one best suites their specific needs.
Or they could just go down one route, put their fingers in their ears and then shout "MS sucks" from the rooftops. After this they will no doubt go home to their XBOX 360, find a videogames forum and then shout "the PS3 sucks".
Very useful for budding web devs to show case talent and network new business.
Way to go MS!
Free tools
Free training
startup help.
for some people, no matter how hard they try, they just don’t measure up to their utopia version of success. MS is a business with business concerns and they also show concern for the budding development community.
Way to go Microsoft!
Hi,
"There are reasons why most successful website startups do not use Ms stuffs"
Google’s Orkut uses .net
This is low, even for MS.
There’s little disputing this is deceptive, but despite all the marketing budgets, the highlight is that .net still isn’t a compelling web application platform.
Rails and Django are ridiculously fast for development, while Zend Framework provides the best integration with legacy components, and all of these are massively scalable out of the box.
How is it that ASP.net (even MVC) requires 10 times as many developers than Django for seriously complex systems? This matters to startups a lot more than a few free Windows Server licenses with strings attached.
Testing 1 2 3 … am I still banned? All I did was posting top sites that don’t use Ms technology …
"How is it that ASP.net (even MVC) requires 10 times as many developers than Django for seriously complex systems? This matters to startups a lot more than a few free Windows Server licenses with strings attached."
It’s incredibly easy to come up with statements like that though isn’t it.
How is it that ASP.net requires developers to grow whispy white beards and worship Saint Guthrie at the doors to Redmond?
See… we can all claim things without having to back them up with facts.
People seem to get very protective about their chosen platform when it comes to debates like this and consequently their arguments are inherently weak.
I have developed several web sites using ASP.NET MVC, these are commercial web sites which were written for a highly profitable company. They are easy to maintain, backed by unit tests and scalable.
I have also used Rails (in fact we use Redmine for project tracking) and agree that it has a lot of compelling features, as does MVC.
However many business back C# because commercially it makes the most sense. They can get C# programmers in fairly easily and draw on the experiences and support of a large active .net development community.
Why (Patryk) do people who use technologies like Rails feel compelled to come to a blog post like this and slate an initiative which doesn’t affect them?
Surely people can try all the options and form their own opinions? Or are you against that too?
"However many business back C# because commercially it makes the most sense. They can get C# programmers in fairly easily and draw on the experiences and support of a large active .net development community."
I disagree with you. Most businesses who back Ms do so because of the corporate image. Open source in web development arena has much much larger community size.
Rails is new but it is gaining developers really quickly. I’m not a Rails programmer, but I don’t have problem admitting that facts. You just have to check some barometer to see the trends.
"Why (Patryk) do people who use technologies like Rails feel compelled to come to a blog post like this and slate an initiative which doesn’t affect them?"
Welcome to the Internet! The owner of this blog is free to delete comments.
"Most businesses who back Ms do so because of the corporate image"
I’m not sure I agree with that, and it’s a sweeping statement which is very hard to prove.
There are definitely reasons why people stick with .net technologies. An ex work colleague of mine used to say "nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft", and the natural migration for C++/VB programmers and indeed asp developers would seem to be towards .net.
But I think in recent years Microsoft’s approach to development (under Scott Guthrie) has changed, maybe they realised that they had to make changes or risk being left behind.
Whatever the reasons, the result is asp.net MVC, a platform which supports generally accepted programming best practices e.g. TDD, separation of concerns etc. gives the developer finegrained control over the rendered html and ships with JQuery (open source) out of the box.
Also for any company doing more than just web work (win forms programming etc) there are benefits to everyone using the same tools and technology.
I guess we could sum this up by saying that competition is a good thing, it’s very possible that the ASP.NET team wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for Rails, Django, PHP etc. and vica-versa