New products in DreamSpark: Expression Studio 3, RDS 2008 R2, CCR & DSS Toolkit 2008 R2, XNA Game Studio 3.1

August is the month of releases! The DreamSpark program lives and successfully develops, replenished with new products.

Quick reference for those who hear about the program for the first time: DreamSpark is an initiative of Microsoft, in which any student, graduate student or schoolchild over 12 years old can get free licensed Microsoft software for development and design.

Today 4 new products have appeared in DreamSpark:

• Expression Studio 3
• Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2
• CCR & DSS Toolkit 2008 R2
• XNA Game Studio 3.1

Microsoft Expression Studio 3

Microsoft Expression Studio 3 is a new version of a set of products for user interface design, website development, vector graphics and video processing.

The package includes: Expression Blend ™ + SketchFlow, Expression Web, Expression Design and Expression Encoder.

Overview of Expression Studio 3 Habré - habrahabr.ru/blogs/microsoft/65147
Learn more about Expression Studio 3 can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2

An updated version of the toolkit for developing applications that control robots in a virtual or physical environment.



In the new version: DSS Log Analyzer, improvements in the visual simulation environment, fixes for some bugs, additions to the documentation.

About RDS 2008 on Habr - alexdebian.habrahabr.ru/blog/44794 and habrahabr.ru/blogs/robot/66638
You can learn more about the new version here http://blogs.msdn.com/rustudents/archive/2009/06/ 24 / microsoft-robotics-developer-studio-2008-r2.aspx and here http://www.microsoft.com/robotics/

CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 R2

A set of .NET and Compact Framework libraries and utilities for developing loosely coupled and distributed applications.

The CCR part is aimed at supporting application development for multi-core and parallel systems, facilitating the management of asynchronous operations, parallelization, control over parallel-running equipment and partial malfunctions. DSSs provide support for the development of distributed applications based on a composition of “state-driven” services, notification of occurring events, and weak coupling through data isolation. Initially, CCR & DSS were part of RDS, but gradually “grew” into a separate project. More information about CCR & DSS Toolkit 2008 R2 can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/ccrdss/

XNA Game Studio 3.1

An updated version of the tools for developing games for PC, Xbox 360 and Zune.

New features of the XNA Framework:

• Support for avatars (3D people) and XNA LIVE Party
• Video support (including full screen video, video texture, video playback control)
• Audio Enhancements
• Improvements in content management, simplifying the addition of custom types

About XNA on Habr - tyrann0s.habrahabr.ru/blog/51560
More about XNA Game Studio can be found here http://creators.xna.com/

Complete list of products available through DreamSpark

• Windows Server 2008 (3) Standard
• Visual Studio 2008 (5) Professional Edition
• SQL Server 2008 Developer
• Expression Studio 3 (2)
• Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2
• CCR & DSS Toolkit 2008 R2
• XNA Game Studio 3.1

Optional: Express versions of Visual Studio 2008 (5) and SQL Server 2008, Virtual PC 2007, ITA Student Pass training courses.

Registration on DreamSpark - dreamspark.ru , product downloads - dreamspark.com Good luck

and creativity!

ps If you have questions about registration or any problems - write to me.