Murmurs

Last week I attended  it@corks breakfast meeting in Rochestown Park hotel. Ronan Geraghty introduced the Microsoft Bizspark programme which provides Microsoft software and services to start-ups. The slides from the event are available on it@corks blog.

John Galvin from BackUpEarth.Com are currently participating in this programme and John made a presentation showing how their business has benefited from Bizspark. The BackUpEarth slides are also available from the it@cork blog.

Since then, I’ve signed up to the Bizspark programme for Murrion Software. I confirmed with it@cork that the business meets the criteria for the programme and got back an enrollment link to get started.

To be eligible for BizSpark, all of the following must be true. Your Startup:

• Is in the business of software development
• Is privately held
• Has been in business for less than 3 years
• Has less than US $1 million in annual revenue

I filled out a couple of forms and got a welcome email back from Microsoft Bizspark. 2-6 hours later I was granted access to the MSDN using my existing Windows Live ID.

I started out developing apps using ASP a good few years ago and now I have the opportunity to develop versions of software using ASP.NET. I’ve since downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to begin developing some apps and get back in to ASP.

I’ve been developing using PHP for the last 5 or 6 years so I’ll be fun to get ASP going on the server using Apache instead of IIS.

One thing I noticed though on MSDN  is that the downloads don’t work when using the Firefox browser. It downloads the default.aspx page instead of running it. Switching over to Internet Explorer works  fine which installed an independent downloader to download any apps.

Another benefit of the programme is being able to list your product or service on Bizspark DB.  I’ll add Murrion Software up there soon enough, I’ll be curious to see if there is any resulting traffic to the site.

Who knows, maybe I’ll drop all the open source stuff and go back to Microsoft.