Microsoft Academic Alliance

There’s two colleges in the town where I live. The state university, and the community college. The university has the football team, the prestige, and most importantly the student discounted software available for those who enroll. Naturally, I go to the community college ($47 per credit hour? Yes please).

I spent some time being bummed about my lack of cheap operating systems and copies of Office. Than I started in the Microcomputer program, and enrolled in the Microsoft Academic Alliance. I knew it included access to programming suites, but that was about it. Here’s a sampling of the more useful programs available for my educational pleasure:

• Microsoft Access
• Windows XP Pro
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Server 2008
• MS-DOS 6.0 (!)
• Visio Professional 2007
• XNA Creator’s Club Subscription

The one that really surprised me was the XNA Creator’s Club subscription. It’s basically an SDK for making games for the xbox, and the ability to rate and critique other member’s creations. You can learn more about it here. Normally they charge you 100 bucks for a subscription, which although a mere drop in the bucket compared to the price of say..Windows Vista Business..is still nothing to sneeze at.