Microsoftâ„¢ seems to be in a giving mood this year as they’re all set to launch a project that allows colllege and university students to get copies (legit) of their developer software FREE. Yep you read that right. FREE.

The program is called Microsoft DreamSpark and the suite to be given away includes Visual Studio Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio, Expression Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server.

As a developer and a student, the only means of getting such packages were to either pay for them in full (which is hard, I’m a student after all) or acquire them from less legal means (P2P, bangketa shops, etc). Now to rid future developers of that problem, Microsoft is giving away these software for free. I could already imagine the amount of headaches I could’ve avoided had this program been in the works a few years back already.

For now though, only students from Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. will have access to this offer. Other countries, and even pre-college students, will be added later on this year as Microsoft promised. What you need though is any verification that you are an actual student, an ID or certificate of matriculation should do.