I have selected two winners for the VSTS/MSDN subscription. Here are their winning comments:

" I believe the team I work with deserves this prize because our current setup is half-assed due to budget constraints and management not understanding our software needs. We currently are running subversion as our source control on a Pentium II computer stashed in the corner of our office. We don't have any way to share our code, and we have multiple copies of libraries and code on each developer's computer. Our graphics department has to email us changes that need updating on our site, because they don't have any method of pushing updates. We are also adding at least one more developer (hopefully two) to our team in the coming months, and would like to have a more complete/concrete development process. Unit testing is almost non-existent with our projects spread out and unorganized. With the pace our company is growing, we need the proven tools to help us manage that growth, rather than relying on a completely disjointed set of applications. (p.s. I’m from Erie, does that help me at all?)"

The second winning comment is:

"My company uses VS 2003/Vault/Fogbugz to create some super cool stuff (.NET processing terabytes of data, http://go.pictology.com). Getting Team Suite would allow us to free $ to use for more SQL Server licenses. We'll still be eating rice/beans, using doors for desks, etc., but we would be able to have some kick ass development tools along with money for beer."

The first comment was from Ron Richardson in my hometown of Erie. I was able to visit Ron at work at the Funding Factory and they have a really great setup that is growing at a nice pace. Thanks for the tour Ron!

You'll notice in both these comments the primary reason for wanting the software wasn't simply because "I can't afford it.". Most of the comments posted were due to lack of funds, but if you remember from my post, I specified that you must want, need, and be able to use the software. Very few of the comments fullfilled these requirements in detail.

The second entry, by Sean Foley was short, but to the point. It provided example sites, and the reason wasn't simply that they didn't have the money. Rather, they will use the savings to purchase licenses for SQL Server. Sean is using DotNetNuke for their Pictology project (www.pictology.com) and he provided an excellent overview of the project and technology that I am posting here:

 What is Pictology?

Pictology allows professional photographers to easily put their images on the web, and securely allows clients to browse and purchase the photographer's images.  Simply put, Pictology is ecommerce for images.

Pictology consists of a client side "smart app" that is distributed over the web.  This wizard-based component allows photographers to enter the event information, select images, set prices, and finally upload all this information to Pictology's servers.

These photographers can easily shoot 5+ gigs of photos per event.  Not only do we have to handle the load of all the photographers uploading images, but also concurrently support hundreds of people viewing and ordering these images at the same time.  It's a huge data flow problem.

The rest of Pictology is web based.  It consists of a sales site (http://go.pictology.com), the online gallery viewing site (www.pictology.com), and the account management site (https://myaccount.pictology.com).  We use customized versions of Dot Net Nuke for the sales and account management site, and straight ASP.NET for the online gallery site.

Challenges:

Our development team is setup to be decentralized.  All of our development tools must support a web based interface.  We use Fogbugz for defect management, and Vault for source control.  We also use a modified XP/Test-Driven development process.  We have automated unit tests and deployment scripts that are activated whenever a file is checked in.

Our biggest problem has been source control, which has limited our development efficiency.  For example, we can break our development into parallel branches, but because Vault doesn't support branch-to-branch merges, we effectively have to put both branches into one development branch (off the trunk, typical VSS style).  This makes one project critical path the shorter projects.

To overcome this, we have alternated between small one week "quick hits", and 2-4 week "big" projects.

How Will We Use Team Suite?

We will now use one tool suite to handle our source control, unit testing, and automated builds.  We'll also take advantage of the FX-Cop best practices code checking.  If Team Suite supports branch-to-branch merges (similar to Clearcase or Perforce), then this is really going to increase our development velocity.  I'll finally be able to schedule 5+ concurrent development branches.

The Team Suite roles/templates should help make sure our code tree continues to conform to our standards as we take on even more geographically diverse developers.

We're also very interested in the ASP.NET 2.0 improvements, specifically the themes and caching enhancements.

Finally, because we do not have to make a capital outlay for team suite (and a replacement source control system), we can redirect this money towards other purchases, such as more redundant storage space or for licensing other software products.

Congratulations to both Ron and Sean for their efforts in developing with some great Microsoft tools!

I have a couple more licenses to give away so keep watching the site for more information.