I don't usually blog about promotions and vendor programs - but this is something we joined and if you are a startup using/considering Microsoft's technologies you ought to hear about.

The program is called Microsft Bizspark and essentially it gives you free licenses for all the development team for the porpuse of designing, developing, testing and demoing the application - that's a huge save in development costs (we're using tools like Mingle and subversion but the program even includes a license for team foundation server if you fancy that)

Furthermore, if you, like us, develop a software as a service (SaaS) solution you are also eligible for free production license

To be eligible you have to

1. be a startup that develops software
2. privately held
3. be in the business for less than 3 years
4. and have less than 1 million USD revenues

check out the program guide for more details