Microsoft DreamSpark - VS Pro 2008 Free to Students
FREE?
Microsoft has announced a great program for College students in 11 countries. They are going to give away Visual Studio 2005 AND 2008, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Standard, XNA Game Studio 2, and Expression web developer.
The project is called Microsoft DreamSpark and is available I believe starting today.
View the original post and interview with Bill Gates on MSDN Channel 8.
Why does it matter?
I personally think this is a big deal. More and more college students are tempted by Dot Net, but do not have the tools to learn. And as a person who has taught at the University level I can tell you that classes do not get approved unless all the software for your course is free to the students.
These are skills all of us in the Dot Net development community need students to come out of school with a basic understanding. I can remember about five years ago hiring people for Dot Net development and the vast majority of the candidates thought it was a new version of VB! This was right around the time 1.1 had come out and I was shocked that so few people knew what it was and why it was a big deal.
I think this is a great announcement for all of us who hire developers. I am only sad that we will probably not see the real impact of this in our industry for another four to six years as it filters through the academic circles and finally into the classroom.
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Comments
EricB on on 2.20.2008 at 9:10 PM
Unfortunately, having worked for at a University, and having taught at a couple of others, I think that 6 years is very optimistic. I remember when I was going to school and C was the primary language being used (other than Cobol and Fortran) in industry, we were still learning Pascal in our main courses. When I was teaching about 4 years ago (I was teaching System Admin rather than dev courses), they were still teaching C and C++, and only beginning to consider Java.
It has been my experience that they only update the languages they teach if they have an instructor who is very pushy about moving forward, or the majority of the textbooks coming out are in the new language.
Unless MS gets some of the top "textbook writers" to update/rewrite their textbooks using a supported .NET language (C# or VB hopefully), I wouldn't expect to see universities changing in the near future.
EricB
Jason Short on on 2.20.2008 at 10:20 PM
I think there is enough of a push right now from students who want to learn dot net as well to make schools speed that up a bit. I know here in the US the Universities are all big money now. And if they can attract students to gaming programs and other specialty degrees they make a lot of money.
When I was teaching we also had deals with certain book publisher to get free or nearly free books to students in some cases. But the school I taught at was a little different in each student pre-paid their education and then everything was included for them (including laptops per student).
Thanks for your comment!