Great deal. For $25 + shipping you get a Windows 8 Professional license, Parallels 8, and a USB stick. Just change the "disabled" attribute on the order button, and you're all set.
Well, that was disappointing. Spent about 20 minutes trying to get in on this, only to find out it is sold out when the site finally loads. If they want developers to give Windows 8 a spin, they'll need to put in a little more effort to make this process less of a pain.
My checkout experience:<p>Enabled the button, clicked it, nothing happened. Looked in Firebug at the Network console, saw a failure come back from the 'Pay' step.<p>Triple-checked my payment info, clicked the button once more. 25-30 seconds later, I got two consecutive "Something went wrong" javascript alerts. A minute or so later, I got two confirmation emails, lacking any useful details. I'm guessing I was charged twice.<p>Once it is possible to log into the site, I will see what my order status says. Right now /login continues to time-out.
The cynical developer inside me thought, "Windows 8 has so little traction among Windows developers, Redmond is trying to attract Apple developers out of desperation."
A more direct link to the page to get the kit<p><a href="https://swish.com/swish-frontend/views/buy-devkit.html?p=devkit" rel="nofollow">https://swish.com/swish-frontend/views/buy-devkit.html?p=dev...</a>
I think this is an excellent idea for Microsoft, but this web site has cratered under the load.<p>I'm assuming they're using Stripe from the little message on my JS console, but I'm having some serious trouble getting it to accept my payment (in Safari on Mac OS X, Chrome isn't connecting at all).<p>EDIT: I am getting "something went wrong :(" after clicking submit, two or three times now.
Every time I submit the order I just get a javascript alert with "something went wrong :(" No idea if the order went through or not...<p>Edit: Got an order confirmation via email. However, I really think when you are dealing with payments you should implement a more detailed explanation than a javascript alert of "something went wrong"
Besides building Windows 8 apps, I think you can even build Windows Phone 8 apps with this. It looks like Parallels now has support for all the virtualization / SLAT stuff that the WP8 emulator needs. (VMWare Fusion 5 has this as well.)<p><a href="http://kb.parallels.com/en/115211" rel="nofollow">http://kb.parallels.com/en/115211</a>
Makes me wonder if Microsoft would ever consider releasing IE for Mac OS X again. That would seem to be a good way to make sure Mac Developers target IE...
Argh! I placed an order but due to the overload it said "something went wrong" I thought I'd give it time to cool down and now they're sold out :(<p>Oh well.
Sorry if I missed this - but what do you get on the USB stick that isn't the same as downloading Parallels / Win 8 / IE10 combo they offer on the site?