Microsoft enjoys giving software away to students. It’s obviously in everyone’s best interest. Students get cutting edge technology and Microsoft gets young and hypercreative minds helping to shape the course of innovation for years to come.

If you are a student, signing up for DreamSpark is a no brainer. I can’t think of a reason not to. The DreamSpark website is pretty simple, but my colleage Bret Stateham created a slide show to make it just that much easier, or if you’d rather watch a very extensive video demonstration of this process as well as the process of getting a Windows Store developer account, check out Bret’s YouTube video. And if you want to watch a 4 minute video of me actually signing up.

Once you’re in the program, download some development software, then check out Microsoft Virtual Academy and get started writing curly braces. Writing code is a blast and may just help supplement your income while you work on that art history degree :)

If you’re a student at UW, then I’ve got a cool opportunity to throw your way.

Come to the Microsoft Appathon @ UW, learning to build apps, eat free food, win cool prizes, and get $100 per app on top of it all!

We’ll be giving away a Surface and some Xbox hardware, and who know… we may even have a good time too.

Instead of just a single event, we’re also going to hold two mini-events to give you an opportunity to get your system set up and ready for developing Windows 8 apps. Below are the event dates and registration links. I’ll see you there!

Mini-event - Tuesday, May 7: http://aka.ms/uwmini1

Mini-event - Friday, May 10: http://aka.ms/uwmini2

Main event - Saturday, May 11: http://aka.ms/uwappathon