I’m normally very cautious when I read about free offers on the Internet. It is often the case that free does not really mean free. This time however it seems to be the real deal, that is if you are a student from one of the following elven countries: US, UK, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Belgium.
If you are you can grab free Microsoft software including Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and several more. All you need is a Live ID (which is free as well) and a way to identify yourself as being a student in one of those countries.
The real beauty of this system is that you do not need to study Computer Science to be eligible for those free full version downloads of Microsoft software, they are available for everyone. Here is a list of all Microsoft tools currently available:
- Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
- Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
- SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
- Expression Studio
- XNA Game Studio 2.0
- XNA Creators Club Online
- Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
- Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition
- Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition
- Visual Web 2005 Express Edition
- Visual J++ 2005 Express Edition
- SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
- Microsoft Virtual PC
Impressive List, ain’t it ? The process is as simple as it could be. You pick a software product from Microsoft first, then log into your Windows Live account, pick your continent from the world map, pick your country and finally your University from a list of available ones.
Not all Universities are listed in that menu, if yours is not in the list you need to check this page to see what you can do about it. A method for all countries is to use ISIC to identify yourself which is available as an option amongst all listed Universities.
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Maybe I should become a student again!
Half of the product listed are already free to everyone…
the rest is mostly equivalent to what I got for free when I was a student (I also got Win XP Pro free), and is indeed a good commercial idea, to shape the students to your tools with free offers.
One could note though, that many competing products are already available for free, for everyone, ever and forever, through open-source-ness.
I’ll admit it sounds great. The bottom line for me though is what would I do with this software if I’m not an IT student?
please let me know how I can get Microsoft Office for free. I had it on my computer and it was deleted.
thanks leslee carles