There are three ways that you can participate Microsoft tinker with this programme a lot, and the current breakdown of the structure and benefits can be found from here - although frankly the entire programme is pretty opaque. The Microsoft Partner Network is the main way to form a commercial relationship with Microsoft, and your payback for forming said commercial relationship is reduced cost on licenses.

The programme is open to 'accredited schools' or 'accredited educational institutions' around the world, so anyone in full-time education should be good to go. This to me is a critically important good habit for software engineering autodidacts, so kudos to Microsoft for this. This means that students have access to, particularly, the unit testing tools in the pro versions. I'm really glad to see the VS versions being the full-on professional versions here too. The inclusion of older versions of VS and Windows Server is a nice touch - it implies an enterprising young student can earn some extra beer money and experience doing maintenance on existing apps. But it's a good programme - for free you can get Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Expression Studio 4, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2008 Developer. Cute.ĭreamSpark is the programme offered to students, and I won't spend too much time on it as most of you will be more interested in the commercial stuff. This appears to be Microsoft's preferred name for programmes designed to 'spark' interest in the developer community. Three of the programmes that we're going to look at in this article end with the name 'Spark'. Please bear in mind that you need to do your own research before embarking on any of these programmes. This list isn't intended to be complete - it's not a catalogue, it's designed to give you a feel of how the various programmes work and how much they cost.

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