Do I have to pay a fee to develop or deploy a .NET application?

asp.net .net payment
0xFF picture 0xFF · Mar 19, 2009 · Viewed 26.4k times · Source

I have heard that .NET is not free and that I have to pay Microsoft if I develop a .NET application. Is this true? If so:

  1. What do I have to pay?

  2. I'm a subscriber to the MSDN via the Academic Alliance (we download a variety of Microsoft Software products for free, like VS2008 and Windows Server 2008). Do I have to pay for the software that I make with these tools?

  3. What about web apps with ASP.NET? Is there a payment due when I host my application or do I just pay for the technology?

EDIT:

So what you are saying is that it's the same to develop a web application using ASP.NET or PHP (ignoring technical issues, just payment side), all what I have to pay is the hosting fees?

EDIT 2:

.NET rules :)

Answer

Reed Copsey picture Reed Copsey · Mar 19, 2009

There is nothing about .NET that requires you to pay.

Often, you will hear that it is not free, but this is referring to the GNU concept of "Free" as in "freedom", not free as in price (or, in their words, .net is free as in beer but not free as in freedom).

You can use your student license to create .net applications. You can also download VS 2008 Express Edition, which is fully functional to develop.

Alternatively, you can develop in .NET using non-Microsoft products. Mono includes a completely separate, free runtime. There are even free IDEs available, such as SharpDevelop.

--- EDIT ----

Yes. You can use .NET to develop and deploy a website, an application, or anything else. There is nothing in the technology itself that requires payment. The only thing that requires payment is certain tools (such as Visual Studio Professional Edition or the Visual Studio Team Editions). There are lots of ways to develop with .NET for free.

For free ASP.NET development, you have two options. The first is to use the Mono Project's ASP.NET Implementation to run your site. This is completely free, and handles asp.net sites.

However, if you are paying for hosting, your host is paying the licensing fees for Microsoft IIS and the hosting of asp.net sites. The cost to you is included as part of the hosting.

Related questions

In C#, what is the difference between public, private, protected, and having no access modifier?

All my college years I have been using public, and would like to know the difference between public, private, and protected? Also what does static do as opposed to having nothing?

Read More
How to Convert JSON object to Custom C# object?

Is there an easy way to populate my C# Object with the JSON object passed via AJAX? This is the JSON Object passed to C# WEBMETHOD from the page using JSON.stringify { "user": { "name": "asdf", "teamname": "b", "email": "c", "players": ["1", "2"] } } …

Read More
Invalid postback or callback argument. Event validation is enabled using '<pages enableEventValidation="true"/>'

I am getting the following error when I post back a page from the client-side. I have JavaScript code that modifies an asp:ListBox on the client side. How do we fix this? Error details below: Server Error in '/…

Read More