About to release my first program for sale. Looking for a little advice.

[EntityX]

I've never made any money programming and am basically a self taught VB.NET programmer. I've been working with VB.NET 2003 for a little over 2 years now and am almost done with a project I've been working on for about a year now. I want to release it and will try to make some money with it. It's a computer art program that I think will have pretty wide appeal. It's for amusement and entertainment.

I have the standard version of VB.NET 2003 and also have an academic version of Visual Studio 2005. I noticed that you can buy just VB.NET 2003 standard but as far as I know you can't do the same for Visual Basic 2005. You have to buy Visual Studio 2005 which of course has Visual Basic 2005 included in it. When I bought Visual Studio 2005 online I didn't see anywhere where it said it was an academic version but when I received it it became clear. The seller said they don't take returns on software but I'm thinking I wouldn't want to release the software I'm working on in the academic version. I want to release the program with the code so that if someone wants to see how I did the programming they can.

Do you think it would be ok to release it in the academic version. If I had the big bucks I would probably just buy Visual Studio 2005 standard but I don't. I'm not sure how much it costs to buy a non academic version of Visual Studio 2005 Standard but I know it's a lot more. Maybe the express version would work ok. Would Microsoft have issues if I released a program to sale for the public in an academic version. Probably not a good idea. I could release it in a VB.Net 2003 version. Someone who is very knowledgeable about this can give me their opinion.

I still haven't upgraded to Vista. I assume that anything written in VB.NET 2003 will work just fine in Vista right? It should.

Maybe by the time I've gotten everything tuned up and I'm completely satisfied with everything so that I feel the program is ready to release VB 2008 will be out and then I could buy that and upgrade the program to 2008. I hope they offer the option of just buying Visual Basic 2008 but you'll probably have to buy the Visual Studio 2008 and the standard version will cost I don't know how much.

I think that Microsoft is money hungry and that's why they didn't release VB 2005 by itself. It makes sense to do so because if there are service packs you could just have them for what you need instead of some giant service pack that might have more than 50 % dedicated to stuff that you don't use.
I downloaded the service pack for Visual Studio 2005 and it took more than an hour with a T1 connection. Something like 430 MB. Perhaps only a small part of that is for corrections to Visual Basic 2005.

Enough rambling.

[03myersd]

Just one thing to say here:

I assume that anything written in VB.NET 2003 will work just fine in Vista right?

Never ever assume when it comes to MS. The best thing you can do is get someone with Vista to try it out for you. Then report any bugs back to you.

It should.

Probably should yeah....

[Hack]

Never ever assume when it comes to MS. The best thing you can do is get someone with Vista to try it out for you. Then report any bugs back to you.

If you are going to sell a product you have created, then you need to do the testing. You should have a machine with XP on it, and another machine with Vista on it.

You need to test both your installation and setup package as well as the code itself.

[chemicalNova]

You should also release the code if you don't have an obfuscator. That way, when someone does decompile your .NET IDL back to almost identical VB.NET code and releases it.. at least you beat them to it.

chem