Do I have to pay a fee to develop or deploy a .NET application?

Question

I have heard that .NET is not free and that I have to pay Microsoft if I develop a .NET application. Is this true? If so:

1. What do I have to pay?

Answer 1

it's free to develop with c# & ASP.NET, but to deploy your website on IIS you have to pay(as a part of the hosting fee) as said before, and I think it's much more expensive to host ASP.NET than PHP, etc.

Am I wrong? how much should you pay for hosting an ASP.NET website?

Answer 2

I want to emphasize here, fee of VS or other development tools is not the fee of .net framework. sdk, libraries so the .net framework are all free.

Answer 3

Of course you have to pay. Nothing in life is free

:)

EDIT: But seriously, everyone else is correct, .net is totally free, only the professional tools cost money. Sorry if I upset anyone with my sarcasm.

Answer 4

Yes you have to pay for the operating systems at a minimum to develop on. Before the mono zealots chime in it's in no way shape or form at the same level of maturatiy as it's windows counterpart. After the OS cost then it's the matter of what level of IDE support you need. Yes there are free ones ( the express editions and bare bones sdk installers ) but I'd wager you'll want at least VS pro which costs.

Answer 5

You have heard incorrectly.

You can develop .NET apps for free. The compilers/SDK are free and can be downloaded from Microsoft. The framework/runtime is free for your users.

The higher end versions of Visual Studio are not free, but Express versions are available for free.