Brian On Software

Boy was I late for this one!  In case your academic institution lacks a MSDNAA account, Microsoft has launched DreamSpark, a program dedicated for students to get access to various .NET development tools like Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Microsoft Expression Studio, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, etc. for free!  The only caveat is that this program is only valid in the following countries:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• China
• Germany
• France
• Finland
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Belgium

It sucks that Australia, India and Russia aren’t there also, but hopefully they’ll be added before the end of the year (or before you graduate!).

There’s also a FAQ page available that might answer some of your typical questions.

Now you have a good excuse to put the books down and play with LINQ for a while