Awesome Microsoft Tools For Student Developers

Microsoft offers some great tools for student developers to write code and build awesome applications. Here are some of the top tools you can use.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a powerful IDE for creating apps for the web, mobile devices, and the cloud. With IntelliSense, Visual Studio provides live code assistance no matter what language you use, including JavaScript, C#/VB, C++, Node.js, and Python. Moreover, Visual Studio offers great debugging features, including flexible conditions and value inspection, easy multi-thread inspection, comprehensive performance profiling, and IntelliTrace historical debugging.

One of the best features of Visual Studio is its incredible support for popular frameworks as well as its easy extensions. Popular tools like Unity, Cocos, AngularJS, Django, Docker, GitHub, Azure, and many more are fully supported with all of Visual Studio’s features. In addition, if you ever want to extend your applications, you can easily integrate any of the almost 50,000 NuGet packages available to developers for all types of apps.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a new streamlined, light-weight code editor that provides tools like code navigation, Git, and debugging without the need for a full IDE. Visual Studio Code comes with great support for popular languages like Node.js, C#, and JavaScript, with extensions for language support, code snippets, debugging, and more!

Download Visual Studio Code at: code.visualstudio.com

Universal Windows Platform

With Windows 10, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a new way to develop apps for all types of devices - from desktop and mobile, to Xbox, IoT (Internet of Things), and (eventually) HoloLens. Combined with Visual Studio, developers get access to a range of new APIs and extensions that support C#, C++, Visual Basic, and JavaScript. Additionally, new universal controls, layout panels, and adaptive scaling allow you to design great apps that are responsive and effective on any device.

UWP offers an exciting way to build apps for the soon to be 1 billion Windows 10 devices, and as a student, you receive a free Windows developers license for making and publishing awesome apps for all Windows devices!

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a free web framework that makes it easy to build great websites and web apps, with the full support of APIs and real-time technologies. Many popular websites and services use ASP.NET like W3Schools, Xbox, and Stack Overflow. One popular service, ASP.NET MVC, allows you to create robust web apps using an MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture with Razor syntax for embedding server code in pages, using multiple layouts for efficient web pages, and powerful URL routing.

Moreover, with the Azure cloud service, one can easily extend their ASP.NET web app with a robust backend for data storage, networking, and more (see below). In fact, with Azure and DreamSpark, students get free ASP.NET website and web app hosting!

Azure

Azure is Microsoft’s awesome cloud service. More than just data storage, Azure offers a complete suit of tools to extend applications with networking, authentication, notifications, computing, data analysis, machine learning, and much more. This allows you to build up your apps and scale them across Azure’s 22 regions (more than Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud combined).

Azure fully supports all kinds of apps, for all platforms. In fact, one of Azure’s greatest features is its huge support for top open source technologies. Additionally, as a student, you not only receive free website and web app hosting, but also online storage with MySQL or SQL Database, Notifications Hubs, Azure Mobile Apps, Visual Studio Application Insights, and Visual Studio Team Services.

DreamSpark

DreamSpark is a one of a kind program by Microsoft that gives students professional developer and designer tools at no cost! DreamSpark’s catalog allows students to create all kinds of apps, build a robust cloud backend, experiment with IoT, develop databases, and publish apps for all devices.

As a student, simply create an account, verify your student status, and download software! If your school has a DreamSpark subscription, you can get access to even more software titles.

Learn More

These are just some of the major tools and offers Microsoft provides for student developers. Learn more about them from the following links:

Visual Studio - visualstudio.com, Windows - dev.windows.com, ASP.NET - asp.net, Azure - azure.microsoft.com, DreamSpark - dreamspark.com

For more information on what Microsoft offers students, including career opportunities, special offers, and more, head to www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/students/