Microsoft Giving it Away
Looks like if you’re a student, you’re in luck, Microsoft is giving away full versions of Visual Studio, Expression Studio and Windows Server. Interesting move, since as I’ve gotten re-involved with my alma mater, the prevalence of the xAMP stack in college circles is outstanding.
I guess time will tell if this does Microsoft any good. Make no mistake, this is about trying to stem the tide of Computer Science/Engineering students leaving school with their head full of Java and PHP. That seemed to be a focus while I was there, and I’m sure it still is.
3 comments
Fascinating information, Derek. Thank you. I’ll share this with the students I teach in the evening and on weekends.
Great opportunity for students and teachers. Unfortunately, the DreamSpark site suffers from really lousy UI design - MS outsourced it to 9Star Research and they did a poor job. Ugly font. Not designed from sub-optimal screen resolution (like on most laptops). Illustrations don’t follow MS branding. And to top it off, when I got to the page where they verify me as a student and my school wasn’t listed, there was nothing to do. No Back button. No “Click here if your school isn’t listed”. The only thing to do was to sign out.
The list of universities in which they’re able to verify students is still too small. U of Illinois and Depaul are still not listed, so I’m out of luck until they get them on board. Until then it’s MSDN for me.
Interesting. I only looked briefly. I remember seeing some page as to how you sing up if you’re a school and it looked complicated. I have a feeling a lot won’t bother, and will stick to what they’re doing now.
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