We started M2E Solutions back in February and immediately signed up for Microsoft’s partner program. We’ve been making strides towards becoming a Certified Partner (and later on Gold Partner), and last week we reached that goal! We were in the process of signing up for the Empower Program, which is a really good program for start-ups since you get a full MSDN license for $375. But since we achieved the Custom Development Solutions competency, we qualified to get Visual Studio Developer Edition, plus Team Foundation Server for the same price as our upgrade to Certified, which was a no-brainer for us. It was great because: 1) We can display the certified logo. 2) We can use VS Developer edition, which has a lot more features than the Professional edition that you get with Empower. 3) We get TFS!!! At my last job before going independent, I got really into TFS. I was in charge of the deployment and implementation for a team of about 40 people. It was a lot of fun figuring it out and customizing it to fit our needs. So I’m excited about working with it again at some point hopefully in the near future when we can spare some time.
