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

One 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!