Where is my BizTalk Server 2013 Developer Edition?

Published on : Jun 27, 2013

Category : BizTalk Server

Saravana

Author

You can download the entire article as a PDF document. Where is my BizTalk Server 2013 Developer Edition?.
One of the question we normally hear in the community and with various BizTalk customers is “Where is my Developer Edition for BizTalk Server 2013”. In the past versions of BizTalk Server (2009, 2010 etc),  there was a special edition for developers used primarily for development purposes. Prior to BizTalk Server 2010, the cost for it was $500. In BizTalk Server 2010 Microsoft made the developer edition completely FREE. But when they released BizTalk Server 2013, there was no special Developer edition (only Standard and Enterprise). This created lot of queries around
  • What edition should I use for development,
  • Should I buy a full blown BizTalk version for Development,
  • Can I use the MSDN subscription for development, is it legal etc
Even in the internal email groups, this questions popped back and forth since the release of BizTalk Server 2013. The main reason Microsoft didn’t release a special developer edition for BizTalk is due to various dependencies. In order to build a BizTalk solution, you’ll require Visual Studio, SQL Server, Windows and BizTalk server. So the ideal way to get hold of all these products is by having an MSDN subscription. Today at TechEd, Europe the BizTalk product group openly commented on what edition of BizTalk edition developers you can use. biztalk server for development

Here is the summary

If you have MSDN premium or ultimate subscription, then you can use any version of BizTalk Server you can download for your development and testing purposes. There are no restrictions, you can use Enterprise, Standard or Evaluation version. But not everyone has premium and ultimate subscriptions, and for those developers without such subscriptions (or ones who have base subscriptions), Microsoft is going to release a new BizTalk Server 2013 Developer edition in November, at a very affordable price of < $50 (yes only fifty dollars). They also highlighted some of the great benefits of having MSDN subscription, you can get $150 worth of free credit in Azure, which you can use to spin new BizTalk Server virtual machines (you can comfortably run medium size VM for a month with that money). The other benefit is, if you just wanted the pre-built image with all the pre-requisites, you can simply download the VM image and run it locally. For the time being, developers who do not have MSDN premium or ultimate subscription, you can use the 120 days evaluation version until November.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document. Where is my BizTalk Server 2013 Developer Edition?.