Great deal. For $25 + shipping you get a Windows 8 Professional license, Parallels 8, and a USB stick. Just change the "disabled" attribute on the order button, and you're all set.
There's a very strong hint on the site. If you're a developer you should be able to figure it out easily, if you're not a developer you probably won't know how to "remove the disabled attribute" anyway ;)
All it takes is someone to post a few step by step instructions and anyone could re-enable the button regardless of their skills. Hopefully people won't ruin this offer and do that though.
It is easy enough to write a small bookmarklet that anyone can paste into the window to flip off the disabled field. Once that gets into the wild, I can't imagine this offer will last.
Lanthe, how much longer do you intend to keep this running? Because I'm timing out before even hitting the form. Would really love to get this as I've been hoping to get into .NET MVC4 but OEM Win8 pro is quite a lot of money.
The "+ shipping" part amuses me. It seems to sum up the whole "out of touch" reputation that Microsoft has, whether deserved or not. Why wouldn't this just be a download?
Yes, because they're totally charging $25 for a USB stick and throwing in Windows and Parallels for free, and the whole thing would be pointless without the USB stick.
Microsoft isn't being stupid here. The puzzle is a hurdle. The donation and (waiting for) shipping are additional hurdles. Hopefully all of these hurdles filter well for the kind of developer Microsoft want to attract.
Well, that was disappointing. Spent about 20 minutes trying to get in on this, only to find out it is sold out when the site finally loads. If they want developers to give Windows 8 a spin, they'll need to put in a little more effort to make this process less of a pain.
Yeah, I've been periodically refreshing it all morning, only to finally receive the 'sold out' message myself.
In all fairness, I don't have any immediate needs for Windows development, and it's by no means a certainty that I would have actually built something Windows-centric, so it's probably no great loss for either side.
Enabled the button, clicked it, nothing happened. Looked in Firebug at the Network console, saw a failure come back from the 'Pay' step.
Triple-checked my payment info, clicked the button once more. 25-30 seconds later, I got two consecutive "Something went wrong" javascript alerts. A minute or so later, I got two confirmation emails, lacking any useful details. I'm guessing I was charged twice.
Once it is possible to log into the site, I will see what my order status says. Right now /login continues to time-out.
Just did something similar, saw that I was getting an SSL Error in Safari from their JSONP Callback on https://swish.com/swish-backend/..., opened that link in another Safari window and it appeared to go through.
I have one pending charge on my credit card, not sure if anything else will go through, but I did end up getting an order confirmation.
Maybe whatever they're using to route SSL traffic through is falling over?
Mostly what failed was outbound bandwidth. Users weren't getting the JSON response from the payment page, though sometimes the payments went through. Confirmation emails were very reliable, though, (thanks Amazon SES!).
The cynical developer inside me thought, "Windows 8 has so little traction among Windows developers, Redmond is trying to attract Apple developers out of desperation."
Ya, but look at it from a pragmatic business perspective, and this is Microsoft doing exactly what they should to court the prodigal developer: set up a zero hassle Windows environment on your favorite platform for cheap.
Haha, true. But it's a whole lot better than "Buy shitty VM product, then source a retail/whitebox copy of Windows, then Install and Patch, Install and Patch, and set up Dev tools for about $400."
Much thanks for the link. Although I also got a "something went wrong" javascript pop up, I managed to submit the order successfully by re-enable the submit button and resubmit it.
I think this is an excellent idea for Microsoft, but this web site has cratered under the load.
I'm assuming they're using Stripe from the little message on my JS console, but I'm having some serious trouble getting it to accept my payment (in Safari on Mac OS X, Chrome isn't connecting at all).
EDIT: I am getting "something went wrong :(" after clicking submit, two or three times now.
You need to up the number by 1000% People are giving up on Microsoft because of the licenses. Personally, I think that .Net MVC is possibly the best platform to develop for, but since it's burdened with licenses, I'm forced down an Open Source route.
The fundamental issue this doesn't address is that developers don't care about Microsoft any more. I've worked in the Microsoft world for nearly two decades, it was how I earned my money, now people are offering £80,000 a year roles for JavaScript.
MS may do another run of these, but we don't know. The other tools on modern.ie are genuinely useful too. We tested Swish using browserstack to resolve a thorny IE8 problem.
Every time I submit the order I just get a javascript alert with "something went wrong :(" No idea if the order went through or not...
Edit: Got an order confirmation via email. However, I really think when you are dealing with payments you should implement a more detailed explanation than a javascript alert of "something went wrong"
I got that too, but immediately after I received an email from swish that stated my order is complete, and that I can check my orders at http://swish.com/login/ (obviously not working right now).
I've not used Swish before and like you said I can't access the login page either. However, I never got any account details so do you know how you would login?
Edit: Managed to get on the page and create an account after some f5 hammering. Turns out all you need to do is create an account with the same email you used in the order and it will display the order status.
We wanted to make checkout easy, but maybe went a little too far. I'll add some more language to the confirmation email explaining what's going on. Thanks for posting the solution.
Besides building Windows 8 apps, I think you can even build Windows Phone 8 apps with this. It looks like Parallels now has support for all the virtualization / SLAT stuff that the WP8 emulator needs. (VMWare Fusion 5 has this as well.)
Makes me wonder if Microsoft would ever consider releasing IE for Mac OS X again. That would seem to be a good way to make sure Mac Developers target IE...
Sorry if I missed this - but what do you get on the USB stick that isn't the same as downloading Parallels / Win 8 / IE10 combo they offer on the site?
On MS's site, you can download VMs for use with an existing Virtualization Platform like Parallels or Virtual Box. The VMs are guest operating systems with limited trial time. MS's docs suggest you use your VM manager to roll back when time runs out.
With the USB key promo, you get a full license for parallels and a full license for Win8.
We have international shipping too for this promo. Click the "International" button in the shopping card on the Shipping line. A Country field should pop up.
To be fair, the headaches today were our (Swish's) fault, not Microsoft's. If MS decides to run another set of these, we'll make sure we are better prepared.
Unless you mean the disabled "I'm a developer" button -- that was intentional and supposed to be fun.
Would you be willing to do a short post-mortem write up on the load challenges your site faced? Since you are part of the HN crowd, I imagine you did all the reasonable things and somethings still surprised you :)
Please also do include in your blog post : 1. Which charities people donated most money? (my guess khan academy)? 2. Who's genius idea was to use 'disabled' attribute on the buttons? 3. How much traffic surge you got from TC, HN, Engadget?
No offense, but it is still Microsoft's fault for selecting an outside vendor who was unprepared. Poor planning and little interest in user experience (be it developer or consumer).
