How to get free (and cheap) stuff from Microsoft!
Learn about DreamSpark, It’s Not Cheating, the MSDN Academic Alliance program, how to walk away from Tech.Ed 2008 with over $1400 worth of software… and more.
Michael and I will be giving a 30 minute talk telling you how to get free (and cheap) stuff from Microsoft, in CB02.04.11, at 12.30pm on Tuesday 3rd June.
- What: Learn about how to get free stuff from Microsoft!
- When: 12.30pm-1.30pm on Tuesday 3rd June
- Where: Building 2, Level 4, Room 11 (that’s CB02.04.11)
Everyone who comes will leave with a showbag full of free gear!
Register your interest by submitting your email address below… or just turn up on the day! Everyone who registers their interest below will go into a draw to win xbox caps and t-shirts, atomic caps and t-shirts, some Microsoft Hardware, copies of Age of Empires III, copies of Vista Ultimate, or perhaps some of the world’s first copies of Microsoft Expression Studio 2!
This wonderful brochure was created for us by Janek Krause – janekkrause@gmail.com – Thanks!
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woohoo! keep those responses coming guys! thanks to everyone who’s already registered their interest.
Look forward to seeing you next Tuesday!
DreamSpark is an interesting concept. I sat up and paid some attention when .NET was coming out — it’s a powerful library and C# is not a bad language. Most importantly, all the usual tools were available in express format for free; Visual C# Express, Visual VB.NET, etc. It’s a good way to get people on board.
It’s an often-used strategy to market software to university students so that they want to continue to use it in their professional career. All the technical software like Mathematica, AutoCAD, etc. has generous academic licences for this reason. So it makes perfect business sense for Microsoft to distribute their development stuff for free. It worked well for Apple — XCode, a beautiful and full-featured development system, has been free and available with Mac OS X since the beginning. And university students are poor.
Vendor lock-in is a big deal for operating system developers. Apple’s doing it with Cocoa, and Microsoft is doing much the same with .NET (except for oddities like the Mono project). If Microsoft is going to keep up with increasing market pressure, it needs killer software infrastructure. A killer app can be written for any platform and anybody can port a killer app, so it’s the tools and libraries at the developer’s disposal which count. Visual studio and .NET are Microsoft’s basis for modern development, so they need to push it. Here are the results, and developers like you guys win.
I’m not at UTS, so I’m not going to be able to see the talk, but hopefully it’s an interesting presentation and some good software will come out of it in the long run. Enjoy.