MSDN & Campus Agreement

TL;DR – you can get the top-end MSDN license, which permits use of pretty much any Microsoft product for software development, for ~£350 per year under the Campus Agreement.

I’ve been in my current role for about a year. An on-going issue is that we don’t have much of a test environment, which means every change is in some sense a “live” change and therefore a risk. Even well understood changes carry some risk, but software development (and perhaps learning in general) is a destructive thing – I need to try things to see what happens and some of what happens might be “breakages”.

The way to handle this is to have another environment that isn’t live and which is OK to smash up and rebuild as required. This seems to be generally understood and agreed, but no such environment has been forthcoming.

So, plan B then: build my own. My boss has given me the go ahead to get a good workstation (more on that later). Actually, I’ve already got a good laptop, but Visual Studio 2010 (with Resharper) just grinds along slowly and VMWare Workstation 7 isn’t exactly fast on it either. The CPU & memory seem ok, but the laptop has picked up anti-virus, SCCM and Zenworks clients and I suspect these all drain precious resources.

On the hardware I will need software. I have previously had an MSDN subscription and am generally aware that this is the right thing to have for software development on the Microsoft platform. It comes in a variety of flavours, but the top-end one (Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 with MSDN) retails for ~£7500 for the first year and £2500 a year thereafter. For this you get access to all the development tools and all the server stuff so you can write and test pretty much anything you want. But that’s still a fair size chunk of money.

I had previously learned that we get a good discount on Microsoft licenses via our Campus Agreement, so I sent an email off to our supplier – Pugh Computers.

I was told that it would cost a bit less than £350. That’s quite a saving.

That’s per developer, per year. Because the Campus Agreement is a yearly subscription we don’t get the perpetual usage rights that the retail MSDN gives you, but that’s not really much of a loss unless you want your development environment to go stale.

This was duly ordered and the subscription delivered via our Campus Agreement logon. It was then assigned to me by email and I now have access to the MSDN downloads & key generation pages.

UPDATE 1: When we assigned the MSDN subscription from the Campus Agreement website we ticked an optional boxed marked “media” or something. Today, a small pouch was delivered containing DVDs with all the latest Microsoft products, including Windows 2008 R2 SP1, Windows 7 Ultimate, Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010. Sweet – saves me downloading them and burning them to disk myself.