Great if you can afford it (Microsoft MSDN Universal Subscription)

Member Name: benlovell

Product:	Microsoft MSDN Universal Subscription
Date:	03/04/01 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: More MS software than you can shake a stick at

Disadvantages: Dodgy licencing

I work for a fairly large web company and recently we decided to signup for the MSDN universal subscription purely for the server software which comes withit.

Basically you receive probably every piece of new software (and old) that is in production at microsoft! We now have development editions of SQL2000, Application Center, Backoffice 2000 and loads more to play with. You also get the subscriptions library, which if you're a developer, is worth its weight in gold.

Basically, the library consists of all MSDN online articals, periodicals, excerpts from the MSDN mag, every SDK and much more. By installing this on a server in your development house, your whole team can get up to date information on bugs, known issues, or just as much information as possible on any chosen languages in which you develop!

There is also a subscriber download section which you can visit to download latest software as its released on beta such as the next windows - WindowsXP or even the new development tool Visual Studio.net. At times this download area has been extremely slow - and even completely unusable, but this is usually at around mid-day when I imagine the whole Microsoft.com receives huge amounts of traffic.

To be honest it's hard to fault the MSDN subscription, you get basically everything MS has to offer for a very very small price, although it has to be noticed - you can only use these versions of software from MSDN for development purposes!!!

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