Developing eWrite

Tomorrow morning I will be emailing a potential client who wants to use eWrite for their website to tell them I can’t help them.

Their site is using ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. I currently only have eWrite Lite using PHP and mySQL.

So my options are to let them know that I don’t have a version of eWrite that will work on their site or else try to get them to host their site with Blacknight.

I’ve contacted their service provider in England. They don’t have mySQL or PHP on their servers and don’t plan to any time in the future. Bummer.

Im fairly sure they won’t want to change their site hosting as they have a close relationship with their current providers and also have other website related databases hosted there.

To add insult to injury, when I demoed eWrite Lite to them they expressed an interest in franchising eWrite Lite in relation to a web design company they are involved in. This would be great for eWrite Lite but alas I don’t think they’ll be jumping up and down about it right now.

As a result of this I’m wondering should I build a .NET version of eWrite Lite? I worked with ASP long before I worked with PHP and so getting into .NET wouldn’t be beyond me. I’m out of the loop on MS stuff though so wondering what costs I will be facing if I go down this road. Do I need a licence of any kind to write .NET apps? Can anyone recommend a good IDE for .NET ? I wonder is there an app out there to convert PHP code to .NET code which might save some time