Students in India Get all MS Development Tools for FREE!!

clip_image002One of the biggest grouse that I had heard from community was that MS development tools were very expensive for people in India. Specifically, students mentioned that it was impossible for them to get the products due to them being expensive.

In the first step, Microsoft made available Express edition of the development tools freely available for everyone. And now, hold ur breadth, it is making the development tools (full editions) available for FREE for students. The products now being made available for FREE are:

  • Operating System: Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition
  • Development IDE: Visual Studio 2005/2008 Professional Edition
  • XNA Game Studio 2.0 and
  • 12-month trial academic subscription to the XNA Creators Club
  • Designer Tools: Expression Studio 2 (includes Web, Blend, Media and Design),
  • Database: SQL Server 2005 Express, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition,

What is great is that Microsoft is making available the entire stack from Operating System to development studio for free to students.

this was revealed today by Bill Gates in an address to IIT Delhi academicians.

To get the software, students don’t have to depend on their colleges. The software is available online at: http://www.dreamsparkindia.com and will be made available offline via DVDs. These DVDs will be distributed by program partners NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers. A student merely needs to offer a proof of identity at a branch of these institutes to avail of a DreamSpark DVD…

In times of recession, this should surely boost the employability of the students by providing them the tools that the industry uses for learning. So, when they step out of college the same tool they have been used to would be available at likes of Infosys, Cognizant etc.

However, India with its bad record on piracy may see software from this program being misused in organisations and enterprises. It may be a challenge for MS to curb this.

Now, the ball is in students court!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

In my continuing discussion with Community Stars across the country, I had a discussion today with Sadashiv. Though he works out of chennai and was here for a short trip, he found time today to discuss the opportunities for Community Star program to improve on. Some of thoughts we generated out of the discussion are as follows: 1. Community Stars are disengaged 'cause of lack of communication with them from MS. Better communication channels need to be developed. 2. Award experience and delivery of the Community Star benefits leave a lot to be desired. 3. Community Stars feel that MS is not laying enough importance on Community Stars and do not value their contributions much. More information needs to flow to CSs. From our end, we are doing the following: 1. Launch an extranet portal exclusively for Community Stars. We will host issue submission on this site. Also, we will share opportunities via this site e.g. beta opportunities 2. Re-launch the Community Star distributi...
Read more

Notes from an Internet Marketing Seminar

These are my notes from an internet marketing seminar I attended. Read through to see if you can figure out who delivered this and i promise you would be surprised :) Topic: Web & New Media: Emerging Trends 183 bn emails sent a day 49 mn internet users in India 7.5 hrs spent on internet/ week (18-35 Males) 1.2 bn searches / month- search increasing at 80% 80% online shop Online Time Spent in India: 23% – TV 30% Internet 26% Print 21 % Radio Advertising Money Spent: 41% TV 1% Internet 40% Print 12% Radio 1.4 bn online out of 6.6 bn in the world mobile is the next huge thing... computing cloud is the current stage after PC being personal era.. web is not US centric.. 211 still the largest.. inspite of the company being so "open source".. the presentation consistently says Confidential & PROPRIETARY .. paradoxical.. the presentation laptop from google is running Windows XP.. sweet.. and oh! the presenta...
Read more

Solving the multi-platform challenge in mobile devices

Image
The writing is on the wall is clear with mobile devices becoming mainstream business devices. In addition to the current workhorse – the PC, consumers and businesses are adopting internet connected smartphones and tablets in record numbers. The path for mobile device enablement for businesses is fragmented and full of challenging decisions. This starts from mobile application landscape being multi-platform and multi-resolution. While Android uses Java, iOS uses Objective-C, Windows Phones use .NET. Natively hitting all of these environments requires one to build multiple versions of an app and to learn multiple technology platforms. New challenges also open up with the client devices in deliver visualizations and touch enablement. How to work with multi-platform challenge Fortunately there exists a solution to this madness in HTML 5. This stack takes advantage of browser based technologies and hence can run on all of the major mobile platforms as well as desktop platforms. However, th...
Read more