Thanks Mark. That helps.
If it was a case of having to buy vista aswell as msdn then its definately
a no.
However, now I have to balance the cost of:
Vista (ultimate for disk encrypt) + Office 2007 Pro + Visual Studio 2008
Pro
against: MSDN
Not sure how that will balance out at the moment as I'm still trying to
get all the prices together. This is all used for development so I am not
going against any licensing.
As I said, it depends what sort of work you do...
E.g. I have one main development machine running 64-bit Vista Business,
Visual Studio.NET Pro, Office 2007 Ultimate, SQL Server 2005 Developer
Edition etc - the cost of just that software alone is greater than the
lowest level MSDN subscription...
However, I also have a whole slew of other virtual machines which I use for
testing. E.g. I have two virtual machines (one running WinXPPro and the
other running Vista Home Premium) just for cross-browser testing - they have
FireFox, Netscape, Opera, Safari etc installed which I would not want on my
my main development machine. I have another virtual machine just for beta
software, currently running the latest CTP of SQL Server 2008, Silverlight
1.1 etc.
If I get a new piece of work which involves e.g. BizTalk, or Exchange, or
whatever, I don't have to worry about whether I can afford the software to
do the work or not...
Until recently, I supported an extremely ancient project running on NT4,
IIS3, MTS2 and SQL 6.5 (yes, really!) Again, that was all running on a
virtual machine.
Similarly, if I get a support call, I can very quickly build a machine with
exactly the same software as the client who is experiencing the problem, and
not have to worry about it...