A great time to be a Computer Science student in India

As is usual to a slightly long post, I start with a bit of historical context. In the days back when I was a student in school, computers were a fairly new thing. I was lucky to have started early on BBC Micros and having access to the Internet waaaay before most people had heard of it thanks to growing up in one of India’s premier universities. In school, our PCs, PC-XTs and PC-ATs were major drool points for us geeks.

However, software was another issue. A few of us loved programming – but access to software was fairly impossible. Getting Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ was quite difficult and it was usually from a (friend-of-a-friend)^n from where we would (ahem) make copies to try out our pieces of code. I remember writing (literally) entire programs on sheets of paper with dry run notations on the side for each variable for each pass and then go type it out in school to try out some new stuff that I had “created”.

These days however, access to software is much easier. Unfortunately, professional quality software is usually quite expensive and for a student in India, typically out of their budget. This is where Microsoft’s recently announced DreamSpark initiative comes to their rescue.

DreamSpark allows students in India to download or get a DVD of most of the Microsoft programming and designing stack for FREE! All a student needs to do is register at the site, get their student status verified and they can get access to the free download and go and simply pick up the free DVD from any of the over 200 locations in India and start using it.

And what is it that they get for free? The list includes:

  • Windows Server 2003 Standard
  • Visual Studio 2008 Professional
  • Visual Studio 2005 Professional
  • SQL Server 2005 Developer
  • Expression Studio
  • XNA Game Studio 2.0

Remember that these are FULL versions of these products, without any restrictions (time or uses) for FREE.

This means that computer science students can now start working with professional level tools right from the start. Also, if anybody uses the “Open Source is best for learning programming” argument, this is no longer true. The Microsoft programming stack is so much more productive and now is accessible by any student in India and all for free to. I wish this was available to me when I was in school too.


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Categories: Development | Internet | Microsoft | Rave | SQL Server

Posted by vinod on November 10, 2008 05:49 4 Comments
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November 10. 2008 11:49

Shekhar

Indeed a great move. Now students no longer need to wander in Nehru Place to get pirated MS tools, buy, install and find DLLs missing. Its indeed excellent for students who are in their final year and are about to go mainstream in a couple of months. What a delight it would be for the employers when they know that the employee is already trained with the tools. Kudos to this move (seriously)

Others may still say (I'm not saying this. I wasn't even in the town):

1. Hmmmm so MS is planning to make all students drag-n-drop robots who will program without knowing under-the-hoods. No more a computer science student can create an operating system. Windows is the future.

2. It would have been great if MS had given some peek into the sources - e.g. how a socket connection is created by IIS to process a request. Open source foolishly Wink does that. It is at the age of a student when a student learns the basics and understands the code line by line. Thereafter, in the job, he/she gets into getting the work done asap, via tools.

Shekhar

November 10. 2008 18:17

vinod

I agree with you - but to an extent only. I think it's the computer science course (school, college, private institution etc.) that should teach them the basics. A student can then use the professional level tools to take his knowledge even further. For instance, if he learns C++ in class, and use VC++ at home to start working on his project, almost instantly he is more productive - being able to use the debugger and other tools that MS provides in VS. If he is interested, he can get into sockets programming on Windows too - MSDN has enough samples and information to do it in both manager and unmanaged code! Smile

Also, since the student starts off early with professional tools, he gets into a coding pattern early - which is also great. Not only that he can start working on latest technologies (LINQ, Azure, Live, WPF, etc.) immediately as well as even understand aspects of design.

Take our own case for example. When we look for new recruits, we have a hard enough time to get people who know normal stuff - let alone the latest - especially the "freshers". Wouldn't it be great if we could grab some right out of college who are already familiar and proficient with the latest tools and tech and can be put on projects immediately rather than having to explain to them how a debugger works in VS?

vinod

November 11. 2008 18:09

Shekhar

Basically you are saying the same except that you are suggesting MS tools for homework and open source for classwork Wink

Shekhar

November 12. 2008 18:46

vinod

Not at all - I think learning the basics can be done in any thing. Notepad + Windows platform SDK is enough. Smile

vinod

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