Dreamspark Goodies

Andy pointed me at a feature of Expression Web that does a similar job to the Balsamiq user interface designer:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx

I had a quick play and you can make diagrams and design the navigation between the forms in your use interface. However, I found it a bit more complex to use than Balsamiq (although it has to be said that it does an awful lot more, and actually lets you construct the interfaces as well as play with them).

For students the interesting thing is that it is available for free from DreamSpark:

https://www.dreamspark.com

If you are a student on an academic course (and have an Athens username to prove it) then you can get hold of all kinds of goodies here, including operating systems and Visual Studio.  You can even get XNA Creators Club memberships so you can deploy your XNA programs to an Xbox 360. Well worth a look.

Comments

[Andy]

Thanks Rob - and in the spirit of continual improvement, UK students need only have a .ac.uk email address in order to access DreamSpark. Yay.

[Jack]

Excellent. I've been looking not to pay for XNA for a while now.
Thanks.

[Jack]

Hey, Rob. During my search for inexpensive windows 7, I happened accross the MSDNAA.
As I first year student of CompSci. do I have access?
If so, how does one go about retrieving login details?

Thanks.

[Rob]

Good news. Yes, you can get W7 on MSDNAA. You should have received your username and password for the service in the last few days. That will give you access to installation disk images and product keys. If you have any problems, come and find me.

[Jack]

That's great. Thumbs up to Microsoft.

And, sorry to be a pain but; should I have recieved my username and password via university email?

If so is there any way I can get them re-sent as I didn't get them.

Thanks again.