Microsoft DreamSpark – Enjoy if you are a student

What is DreamSpark?

Other than totally cool? Glad you asked. Here’s how it works: if you’re a current university or high school student, you can download professional Microsoft developer, designer, and gaming software through DreamSpark at no charge. Yes, students get to download software at no charge. DreamSpark enables students, like you, to download and use Microsoft tools to unlock your creative potential and set you on the path to academic and career success by advancing your learning in the areas of technical design, technology, math, science, and engineering! It doesn’t matter what classes you’re taking right now, just as long as you’re a current student in a verified, accredited School and use the tools in pursuit of advancing your education in one of these areas.

This is an amazing service for students. You can download all the professional tools for free. That include Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 and a lot more. For further information its http://www.dreamspark.com

You have to verify yourself as a student, and the service is not availble in Pakistan through DreamSpark website.

Rozee.pk has taken a good initiative in this regard, and you can have yourself verified through Rozee, and they will send you an access code, which you can then use to download software. I haven’t tried the Rozee stuff, by the virtue of not being a student, but I would appreciate if somebody can give it a go and see if it works. Its http://www.rozee.pk/dreamspark/

But its amazing to see the way Microsoft is giving away its mainline products to students, including Server OSs.

And I am not being paid by either Rozee or Microsoft for writing this post

1.5 times loop

A:

StatusCode statusCode = myComponent.GetProgressStatus();
while(statusCode != StatusCode.Complete)
{
Sleep(n);
statusCode = myComponent.GetProgressStatus();
}

You would have come across this kind of code many times may be, when you need to check for status, wait if not completed, and poll again.  And you might have noticed the duplication of code, and would have modified it to:

B:

while (true)
{
statusCode = myComponent.GetProgressStatus();
if (statusCode == StatusCode.Complete)
break;

Sleep(n);
}

in order to remove duplication. And it looks cool. But the thing I learned today from a guy-with-more-than-20-years-of-development-experience, is that we call this, B approach, a 1.5 times loop in structured programming terminology, and is a recommended way of avoiding code duplication.

So just in case you come across this, and wonder

Magic Code

Magic.cpp

#include"Magic.h"

Dear Computer
Please print "Hello World!" string
Then wait until user pressed a key
Best Regards
Programmer

Well if you know C or C++, you gonna yell at me, what do you expect the compiler to do with this funny string? And to that my answer is: I expect the compiler to compile it perfectly fine, and upon running, it should display “Hello World!” as normal. After all that is what it has been told to do, and that too in a very decent manner.

Yes my friend, its all about Magic. Yeah rite, Magic.h to be precise.

Magic.h

#include<stdio.h>
#include<conio.h>
#define a )
#define Best ;
#define Computer (void){
#define Dear void main
#define key ;
#define pressed (
#define Please printf
#define Programmer
#define print (
#define Regards }
#define string );
#define Then int
#define until =
#define user getch
#define wait x

How was that

Irony of commercialism

I was onto The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs when I saw this ad.

Yeah, rite, its Microsft Dynamics, a product from Redmond.

I dont know how (fake) Steve Jobs would be feeling after knowing about his blog displaying such ads as he normally goes quite hard on Microsoft e.g this, this & this.

But then the piece of software that gets ads and displays em is innocent enough to realize the stuff