MSDNAA or The MSDN Academic Alliance is a boon to Indian students. I have been longing get into that space and surprisingly got into it thanks to Microsoft’s S2B or Student2Business Program.
S2B is much like TGMC by IBM, except that the rules are more liberal compared to TGMC. Here, you do a project, submit it to them and they would give prizes to toppers. Its a project development/engineering competition. I had enrolled my course project into S2B a month back and surprisingly, they activated MSDNAA to those enrolled in S2B. Just refer http://student2businees.co.in/ for more details on S2B.
The real star of the show is MSDNAA. Its a promotion program by Microsoft by which selected Microsoft products are given away as free of cost to students and faculty of an educational institutions with the only catch that they should be used f non-commercial and academic purposes only. In normal cases, a college/school would have to pay an annual fee to obtain the MSDNAA subscription. But, for those in S2B, it is completely free.
The array of softwares offered as free to students include Windows Vista(Business edition only), Xp, Server 2003(including Enterprise, which really costs $3600 in the market), 2000, Visual Studio(all editions up to 2005, including Professional and Team Suites) and a lot of other products.
