Few questions about tools and services available

Question

Apologies if this is tagged under the wrong tags but happy for an admin to adjust accordingly.

A company with 4 developers. Company yearly profit is less than £1 million.

1. Could we use Visual Studio 2019 community edition for free for production applications?
2. Could we use Azure DevOps as a repository for free along with GitHub? If yes how do we start with this?
3. Are there any other services that we could utilise such as free training?
4. I think MVC certification is no longer available. To have people become certified would the next step be to learn .Net Core MVC? If yes what path would be advisable?

Thank you

Answer 1

1. Yes. You can build commercial software with it. You can also use visual studio code.
2. GitHub replaces Azure DevOps repo. You shoukd pick one or the other. Microsoft owns both, so they both work with Microsoft tools. GitHub typically gets azure integration features first. While Azure DevOps supports a GitHub repo, GitHub has azure a deployment actions. The only area Azure DevOps leads (at this point) is Azure Boards vs GitHub Projects. GitHub also has code spaces.

GitHub free has some limits in on the number of actions executed and storage space of private repos. But you should be fine.

If you starting with a clean slate, I’d pick GitHub over DevOps.

3. The docs on this site are good. Also YouTube is full of training videos.
4. Not sure why you’d bother with certification. This may matter for contract programming or applying for a new position. But at a 4 developer company the money would be better spent on training or tools.

If you don’t already know mvc, you should probably pick Razor pages instead.

Answer 2

Hi @Mr Edge ,

Could we use Visual Studio 2019 community edition for free for production applications?

Yes, you can use it.

Could we use Azure DevOps as a repository for free along with GitHub? If yes how do we start with this?
Are there any other services that we could utilise such as free training?

Yes, you can use Auzre DevOps as a repository like Github. But before choice Azure DevOps and Github, you could search azure devops vs github online (using google or Bing), and then you can compare the different between them.

To start with Azure DevOps, see this tutorial: DevOps tutorial—an introduction. And if you want to get the Github tutorial, you can start from here.

I think MVC certification is no longer available. To have people become certified would the next step be to learn .Net Core MVC? If yes what path would be advisable?

Yes, the MVC certification exam retired on January 31, 2021. For the asp.net core MVC, you can check Course 20486-D: Developing ASP.NET Core MVC Web Applications. From it, we can see that at present it still uses the MVC certification exam, there is no new certification exam for Asp.net core MVC.

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Best Regards,
Dillion