DreamSpark 2.0

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released a new version of DreamSpark. For those of you who don’t know what DreamSpark is, it is a ‘product’ from Microsoft that gives students a selection of free software. This is a parallel product to MSDNAA, and lets students download the software on the internet and not be dependent on their schools to actually buy MSDNAA, however it does offer less software, but still enables students to get nearly all the software that they need for development with visual studio.

DreamSpark now offers the follow

• Visual Studio
• SQL Server
• Windows Server
• XNA
• Expression

The only catch at this point is you need to validate that you are a student, to do this you either need to go to a university on a list that is provided or have a ISIC student. At this point if you are a UNSW student you will need to have an ISIC card to access this service, they can be purchased from STA travel on campus or many other places.

 

Microsoft Student Partner

Microsoft is looking for another student partner at the university of New South Wales (UNSW). If anyone is interested please have a look at the following links, and if you are interested either apply online or send me an email with you contact details and I will forward it.

• Student Partners website
• Wiki Page
• Student partners press release

below is a link to the poster for position

Windows Azure and the student community

The release of windows Azure gives us students the ability to build new cloud services. Now while this sounds like a marketing ploy it more or less has my head spinning about the possibilities of what I could do. There are so many great programming languages and frameworks that exist out there, but probability the ones with the biggest corporate languages out there are .Net and Java, however the concept of Azure has taken it to a new level.

The framework is currently in CTP phase and as such there is a queue to get a login and unfortunately like everyone else I need to wait my turn to get a login to the service. There is a CPT download for the local development environments so time to download to installers and develop your killer apps.

I will post some code soon for those that are interested in seeing what an Azure can do.

In the mean time here is a link to Windows Azure