We will be finishing our BizSpark programme later this year.
We currently use Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and within that, amongst other things, have a Database Project.
I have questions related to its use after graduation and also which versions of Visual Studio support Database Projects.
The advice from Microsoft says:
Once you complete the graduation process, you will get a license to keep, at no charge, most of the software you downloaded during the three years you were in the BizSpark program.
However, because all versions of Visual Studio 2013 and later now require you to sign in using a Microsoft account associated with an active MSDN subscription, startups will need to renew their MSDN subscription for each user running Visual Studio after graduation.
So it seems that we will need to buy an MSDN subscription for each developer. If we do that, I assume we can use either 2013 or later editions such as 2015. i.e. there would be no benefit in staying with 2013 as its no longer free. If we don't buy the subscription, I assume it will just stop working. This is frustrating as its not what we were told when we started.
The next question is which edition we need. In 2010, I understand that the Professional Edition did not support Database Projects. But in the documentation for 2013 and beyond, I can't see any such distinction. The implication is that we Professional will support Database Projects, but I'm not certain.
Finally, we also use TFS (on our server, not the cloud service), so I want to confirm that we can use that too with the Professional Edition.
Has anyone else been through this?
Thanks.
I've not done the BizSpark program, but I do know that VS 2015 Professional does support both database projects and TFS.