At our company we are going to develop more for the Windows platform than we have done up until now. As this scale of Windows development is new to us it would be nice with some feedback from experienced developers.

Requirements we have:

• 5 developers from the beginning.
• 15 developers a year from now.
• All developers should be able to develop at the same time.
• Be able to develop solution for ASP.NET and EpiServer 5.

Our idea:

• A shared server which developers use for development through Terminal Services.
• SQL Server Express.
• Start with some free express edition of Visual Studio, upgrade to a commercial version if we need the additional features.
• Use IIS and not the web server built into Visual Studio.

Questions:

• Are we on the right track?
• In terms of license costs the above should be cheapest, right?
• What do you think about multiple developers doing development using a shared TS-server?
• Do you know of any company which has a similar development environment?
• Are we going to miss some features of the full Visual Studio version immediately? Is using Express version a bad choice?
• Is IIS the best choice? If use IIS the developers may use the same port for deployment. If we use the built in web server each one has to set their own port as we're sharing a machine.

Comment answer:

• We are thinking about a shared server as it will most likely decrease the license costs. So it's purely a cost issue. We are using CVS for version control. Our situation is that we develop on Mac and Linux, that's why buying 1 server license + Visual Studio licenses seems to be a cost effective way of starting this type of development.