YES!!!! DreamSpark has been great for me!
I was particularly interested in Expression Studio and actually almost bought Expression Web about a month before DreamSpark was announced. Very glad that I didn't.
What I wasn't expecting was to get as much use out of Visual Studio 2008 as I have. I have it set to web developer mode but that hasn't stopped me from attempting to develop some games for my Zune though XNA. I really want to learn so much more about C# first though but need to slide that in between school work. But when I need, the XNA Studio Connect license will be there for me when I want to start porting over to Xbox 360. I really love Microsoft. You can tell by all the products I've tied myself to. :P
My real dilemma now that money and the software isn't an issue, is what to learn first? I'm really really wanting to learn Silverlight as well as C# and XNA but there's only so much time and just one of me!!
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And to answer Sheerdal's question, Expression Studio is Web, Blend, Design, Media, and Encoder which could be seen as the Microsoft equivalents to Adobe's Dreamweaver, umm... I guess I would say Fireworks for Blend, Photoshop/Illustrator (but not really) for Design, and the last two match the two different programs in CS3. Can never remember all of the program names from CS3... hehe.
Anyway, definitely the software suite to go with if you're developing with Silverlight and .NET otherwise you can go with either Expression or CS3 for web development. Expression Web 2 brings support for PHP so things are going good! |