It's not a lot of money at all (I speak as an ISV - everything I have to pay out truly comes from my pocket!).Subscribers up until recently received ten product keys for nearly every Microsoft client and server product available, including Microsoft Windows and the company's Office suite. I'd say it was an essential purchase - particularly if this is viewed as a career investment, or some element of training or progression. Empower is a fairly pain-free method of getting your hands on all the best tools for very little outlay indeed - you end up with a large pile of DVDs and CDs, and a few updates during the year. If you want to develop for desktop Windows you really need some level of MSDN access, or a good broadband connection and some patience while you access the online materials. It's hard to see what bad thing can befall you if you try to produce something but ultimately fail - it's the American dream, right? You have to stop using the software at the end of the period, etc. If you don't bring a solution to market in the time allocated, you can pay to extend your agreement or. I get all the goodies, plus things like Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office and OS licenses. In return for quite a modest outlay, you get MSDN, a bunch of OS licenses and access to development tools and end-user application programs (XP, Vista, Office being obvious examples).įor instance, I develop in Delphi but write code to run on SQL Express 2005 and full-blown SQL Server 2005+, and this entitles me to purchase an Empower agreement.

As I recall, you have 2 years to bring a product/solution to market (where market is very loosely defined) that uses some element of MS technology (again, where this is quite loosely defined). In agreement with comments already made - get an Empower subscription, it's geared up towards people like yourself.

Msdn operating systems subscription