Github Student Developer Pack includes Visual Studio and Dreamspark | Hacker News Reader

Github Student Developer Pack includes Visual Studio and Dreamspark

github.cmail2.com

94 pointszeusly25 comments

tl;dr Nothing new, Microsoft just increased the Dreamspark program's visibility by making it part of the GitHub Student Developer Pack.

Real URL: https://education.github.com/pack

Sorry for the weird URL. There's no blog post yet, just an E-Mail it got:

´´´ Microsoft Joins the Student Developer Pack Hi there @zeusly,

Happy New Year from the folks at GitHub Education.

To help you get your semester underway, we have some exciting announcements about the Student Developer Pack, events that are on our radar, an opportunity to get an hour of programming mentorship for free, and ways to shine a light on how GitHub is being used in your classes.

backpack illustration New to the Pack: Microsoft DreamSpark with Visual Studio

Today we’re making the first addition to the Student Developer Pack since launch: Microsoft DreamSpark with Visual Studio. You can download Visual Studio now and sign up for access to Microsoft’s own student developer program, DreamSpark.

With DreamSpark, students have access to a suite of great Microsoft resources including software like Microsoft SQL Server, the ability to publish apps and games for Windows and Xbox with a Windows Store Developer account, and online training materials, all for free.

To download Visual Studio and get access to DreamSpark, head on over to your Student Developer Pack.

A Free Hour of Code Mentoring

Brought to you by the folks who created hack.summit(), hack.pledge() is a network of 4,000 developers offering an hour of free online coding mentorship to students like you.

We want to hear from your teachers

We love hearing all the ways GitHub is being used in education. Be it teams of high school students competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition, a professor teaching computer science at UC Berkeley, or researchers working on open source.

We’re on the lookout for interesting ways GitHub is being used for teaching, and could use your help getting in touch with teachers. If any of your courses are using GitHub, tell your teachers that we want to hear from them. Heck, we might even feature your story on the GitHub Education website.

Teachers: tell us your story

Upcoming GitHub Education Events Visiting Dev Academy Mon Feb 16, 2015, Wellington, New Zealand @johndbritton will be there. Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Wed Mar 4, 2015 to Sat Mar 7, 2015, Kansas City, MO @johndbritton, @davideg, @jordanmccullough will be there. Taiwan Campus Tour Fri Mar 13, 2015 to Tue Mar 31, 2015, Taiwan @johndbritton, @muan will be there.

See more upcoming events at education.github.com/events. Cheers, John Britton Education Liaison, GitHub education@github.com ´´´

Isn't the VS Community edition free now anyway?

It is.

This is professional edition. https://www.dreamspark.com/what-is-dreamspark.aspx

I think 2015 Community edition is the equivalent of Professional.

The GitHub page explicitly says Community Edition though. Might give a link to Community Edition if user can't enroll in Dreamspark as not all school participate (albeit most do).

Yes it is, Community[0] is actually the same as Professional just with a different license, the offer does also include DreamSpark[1] so you can get a bunch of other tools, which you could always get free as a student.

Looks like GitHub/Microsoft are doing some cross marketing as DreamSpark now includes the GitHub Student Developer Pack[2].

[0] http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community...

[1] https://www.dreamspark.com/Student/Software-Catalog.aspx

[2] https://www.dreamspark.com/Product/Product.aspx?productid=92

"real world tools can be cost prohibitive"?!

It really depend on how poorly you choose which real world you want to live in.

Some of us don't mind paying for our tools.

Don't mind? Are you so detached from reality?

For most CS students in the world, 'don't mind' is not an option, they simply don't have that money.

My universe isn't penniless college students, it's businesses with the funds to shell out for good tools.

This post is about the GitHub student developer pack.

I don't mind paying for good tools either but the "real world tools are expensive" mantra has not been true for quite some time now.

I have paid for Windows licenses, for MSDN subscriptions, for Visual Studio, for Oracle databases, for ERP tools, for Solaris, for Red Hat and countless others but, quite frankly, I haven't felt a compulsion to pay for tools for a long time now (PyCharm is sweet though).

We have from excellent compilers, IDEs, databases, operating systems all the way to datacenter automation solutions that are free. And, in the case of students, they are also open-source so they can be studied (which used to be an important part of life for students) and extended (which is a nice advantage not necessarily but usually associated to tools you don't have to pay for.

So, what prohibitively expensive real world tools are you thinking of?

This bundle is much more than just OSes and Editors, but includes a lot of coding services which can be a distraction to maintain while also handling one's educational requirements. Yes, you can set up TravisCI instances, an email server, a DNS server, etc, for free. At the same time, being able to have someone else worry about bugfixes and the like can be very useful if you've got a project that you just want to hack on without worrying about also being a sysadmin/devops person for your toolchain.

When I was learning web development, it was such a PITA learning rails and dealing with all the ops stuff at the same time (so I could show friends my stuff, on a real domain and everything). I envy the kiddos that can just hit the "deploy to azure" button or whatever now. (This reads like an ad for microsoft but I promise I don't work there :)

Bingo. Too many colleges still use the ancient and terrible method of requiring one to copy to media between classes, instead of the much nicer, and simpler, git pushes and the like. Add the pain of the overhead associated with a lot of coding frameworks, and you get a lot of ideas that end up stillborn because deployment management is hard, and the free tools are terrible.

I shit you not, MS is going to buy github.

Is kinda of off-topic, but I might be able to get some visibility here.

I have been trying to register my "free .me domain" for a couple of days now, and is impossible, since I'm not from the US, Canda or UK. I already tried to contact Namecheap and they basically told me they couldn't do anything.

Does someone know what I should do? (other them using a fake Address and Zip-code)

It's really funny you mention this because I just spent all weekend trying to get the free .me while actually living in Canada and going to a Canada school. I tried with my own school email, and they took forever to send the confirmation email, so I requested it again. This invalidated previous emails and sent a new one, but every time I re-requested, the email I would get would already be invalid, perpetually out of sink. I opened a ticket, talked to customer support, they didn't really do anything useful. In the end I used my girlfriends email to confirm I was a Canada student, then used my private email for the actual namecheap account.

The whole thing was not very fun, but in the end you seem to need the US, UK, or CAN email for the initial confirmation.

Does this make Github's acquisition by Microsoft imminent?

Nope.

"Microsoft acquires Github" - with the other recent announcements of .NET framework and Roslyn moving to Github, and now this, it may seem the day is not too far off for those headlines to become reality.

Why so many comments about this? Why would they even be interested in buying it, and why would GitHub sell it? Doesn't make much logistical sense.

Microsoft is actively trying to embrace open source.. where else would they go?

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